Geocaching

I was sitting at home working, I had just finished something that I had been working on for awhile when I got an email from Geocaching.com telling me that a new cache had been placed in Alameda. I was ready for a break and wanted to get out of the house for awhile and I am always up for trying to get a first to find so I packed up my stuff and headed out.

When I arrived at the posted parking spot for the cache I saw a pickup truck that had a geocaching sticker on it so I figured I was out of luck as far as getting a first to find. I hopped out of the car and headed to the cache area.

This was a nine stage multi-cache. Thankfully, it sounds much worse than it really is. All of the stages are very close together. This is actually a pretty clever cache, the location is an old campground, each of the different stages brings you to a zone of the campground and these zones are numbered. So you go to each stage of and get the number and then at the end you figure out a pretty basic puzzle using these numbers and get the final stage location.

When I first arrived on the scene I saw a man with a young boy wondering around and I made the assumption that they were fellow cachers and I figured they were the owners of the truck with the Geocaching sticker on it. I called out to them and said “What stage are you guys on?” the man looked at me like I was off my rocker and I quickly just tried to move on and forget that I made an ass out of myself.

I went to all of the different stages collecting the information that I needed and then sat down to figure out the puzzle. I ran into a bit of a problem at this point. Either GSAK or Cachemate screwed up when it exported the cache info to my Treo. The puzzle page has this line on it: Cache is located at AEIBFIC CDGHBA for whatever reason my Treo just said: Cache is located at AEIBFIC. I was pretty sure I was doing the puzzle correctly as with the fragment that I did have I was able to get the North/South coordinate but I couldn’t figure out the East/West coordinate. I tried just walking along the north/south line but that didn’t work (It would have if I had looked harder though). I ended up sitting down and puzzling over it, I didn’t know at the time that I was missing part of the puzzle, yes I had my suspicions, but I didn’t know for sure.

As I was sitting the man with the young boy approached me, I got ready to explain the whole Geocaching thing as you find yourself doing that a lot in this sport but then he surprised me. It turned out that it was the owner of the cache. When it went live he and his son came down to see if they could witness the first to find. We talked about the puzzle and I showed him what was going on and he confirmed my suspicions that I was missing some of the information. He really helped me out here, he called his house and had his daughter go online and check the cache page and then she gave me the rest of the puzzle. With the rest in hand I was able to quickly figure out the east/west coords and shortly after that I found the cache and best of all I was the first person to find it. There is nothing quite like finding a virgin logbook.

After signing the log book I spent a while talking with gcherry talking about geocaching and some of the cool stuff we had found. It was actually kind of funny, we had found a quite a few of his caches on 8/5/2007 on our marathon caching day. In fact I had actually emailed him regarding one of his caches. We ended up talking for probably 20 minutes and had a good time doing so.

I considered going for a couple more caches but I decided to just call it a day and headed home.

Shortly after the caching weekend with my dad, brother and my brothers father-in-law my own GPS finally arrived. I got a Garmin Legend C for those of you who are curious. I was anxious to use it but things were keeping me from going out, I was in the middle of a big project and wanted to get it done. As I was working I got an automated email from Geocaching.com informing that a new cache had just been made active that was only a couple of miles from my house. I decided that it was time to test out the new GPS and hopefully get myself a first to find in the process.

I printed out the cache description, entered the coords into my GPS and headed out. When I ordered my GPS I decided to go ahead and splurge and got the street navigation as well so I had no problem getting to the right spot. I hopped out of my car and headed off to look for the cache.

The cache was in Tilden park, an area I have spent far too little time in as it is quite a beautiful place. I set off on a nice short hike to the cache site and was happy to see the absolutely beautiful views that were right in the area. I finally got up to the cache site and started looking around. I was happy to see that my GPS was working wonderfully and I quickly had the cache in hand. When I opened it up I found a virgin logbook, woohooo, I was first to find!

I walked up the little hill near the cache site and took a breather on the bench right there and soaked in the view and then headed back to the car.

After picking up a couple of caches earlier in the day we all went out to The Old Spaghetti Factory for some dinner. We all had a nice meal, ate too much food and went home. When we got back my brother had received an email alert from Geocaching.com that a new Geocache had been placed and it was only about three miles away from their house. So my Dad, brother and I quickly hopped in the car and headed out to try and be the first to find.

If we were going to be the first to find it it was going to be my very first. So we quickly made our way over to the area, found ourselves a parking spot and noticed that the parking lot seemed pretty empty raising our hopes that we would be the first to find. My brother was holding the GPS so he was leading the way. We made our way to the posted coordinates and very quickly made the find. We were the first to find (FTF)!!

As we were looking through the goodies in the cache and signing the virgin logbook we noticed a security guard approaching us. Not only was I going to get my first to find I was also going to have to deal with “The Man” for the first time as well. The security guard ended up being nice enough, he just wanted to know what we were up to. We explained it to him and by that time we were pretty much done so on our way out anyway so he didn’t give us any hassle.