Geocaching

Official Geocache Page

This cache is a bit more personal than the others, Kyle is my nephew. For Kyle’s fourth birthday his Grandfather, on his Mothers side, who is really into Geocaching placed this cache by my brothers house.

While my Father was still here we were all hanging out at my brothers house and decided to go for a walk. As it turns out, this cache and another were along the walk. My brother had long ago found both of them so he let me take the GPS and off we went hunting. My dad and I arrived at the cache location first and started hunting. The cache description says “A redtip cache hidden in typical fashion”. This of course didn’t help me at all as I have no idea what a redtip is nor how they are typically hidden.

My dad and I looked and looked but we weren’t having any luck. Kyle eventually caught up to us, I guess whenever they go on walks they always check the cache to see what has happened to it so Kyle knows where it is very well. Kyle couldn’t help but help us and he quickly pointed us in the right direction and we had the cache in hand.

Official Geocache Page

This geocache was only about 600 feet away from Monterey Cypress Roundabout so my brother and I just walked over to it. There was a nice trail that led us from one cache to the next so we just hopped on it and headed over. My brother was holding the GPS and as we got closer we watched the feet till destination click away until we were pretty much on top of the indicated location. My brother started looking around and then I looked down at his feet and noticed that he was practically standing on top of the cache.

This was my first time seeing a cache like this and I thought it was clever. It was just a Tupperware type container but the owners had attached lots of fake pine tree branches, like the stuff on those fake Christmas trees, to the container. I found it pretty clever and have seen it done a few times since then. My brother and I signed the logged and then headed out to try and find one more.

Official Geocache Page

After doing Tracks Out Of Service my brother and I headed over to the next closest cache site, there were actually two very close together but the GPS first brought us to this one. This geocache didn’t earn it’s 3-star difficulty in our minds. We parked the car, the GPS pointed us to where we needed to go, which was a tree, my brother started searching one side of the tree and I worked the other. Within 15 seconds I had the cache in hand. Maybe we just got lucky.

We pulled the cache out, signed the log and carefully replaced the cache where we had found it and then headed off to the next geocache, Jade Trade, which was only about a tenth of a mile away.

Official Geocache Page

After Bingo! we headed over to Tracks Out Of Service. My brothers GPS at the time didn’t have street navigation which can make getting to spots a bit tricky. You can see how far away you are from the area but you can’t always tell how to get there. After a bit of driving around and watching our distance on the GPS we finally got to where we wanted to be and started the hunt.

Tracks Out of Service ended up being the most difficult cache that we found that night, not all that surprising when you notice it’s a 4 star difficulty. It also wasn’t helping us when we were reading the cache description printout for Monterey Cypress Roundabout. Once we figured that out and we were able to read the actual geocache description it really helped out. My brother was holding the GPS and the flashlight, which was giving him an advantage and he was the one who made the grab. This was a very clever hide, it was on some train tracks and it blended into the surroundings almost perfectly.

Official Geocache Page

My brother has really got into Geocaching and he kept telling me about his adventures which was making me curious about it again. My dad came into town for about a week and while he was here we all took a trip down to Monterey for a long weekend. While we were there, once we had my brothers kids down to bed for the night (not to mention our father) my brother and I decided to see if we could find the caches that were near our hotel. There were five of them out there and this was the first one we hit.

As we were zeroing in on the location we noticed a sign that said “Bingo” so we figured we were in the right area. We looked and looked and we weren’t having any luck. But then I noticed something, I was able to remove something that was attached to the sign and then, behind that, they had drilled a small hole and there was the cache! It was a very clever hiding spot.

My brother and I signed the log and headed on our way to the next cache, it felt good being the one to find it and I could feel the addiction growing in me already.

Since we have found this cache the owner has made it unavailable. Apparently, a neighbor right near the cache site has seen geocachers out there and he thinks they are trying to steal his identity (his mailbox is near the Bingo sign). People have tried to explain to him what they are doing but he doesn’t listen and just threatens to call the cops. So, sadly, this one is now gone.