My First Find...

I went on my first hunt today. I went looking for something that was easy to find and close to work. With a Satelite picture, the GPS and and a printout of the cache page. Off we went. We being a coworker (R) , who shall remain nameless on the internet, and myself.

When they say it’s deceptively easy, they aren’t kidding. How hard can it be? Right?

So we found the parking lot. That was the easy part. It’s snow covered. We trek down a hill. It’s a little hill. But you can see where people have been sledding. Did I mention we are doing this at lunch from work, so we are not prepared for trudging through snow and muk in our healed boots.

R was looking at the picture and I had the GPS. Looking at the picture now, it all makes sense. You know what they say about hindsight right? We started looking in the section of trees just past the first base line. Yea. I know. It’s not there. Trudging through the snow, half way up the hill, in our pretty little boots. Rummaging through the branches. Kicking at garbage. Wondering what was in the big, full, garbage bag. I finally look at the map of the GPS instead of the coordinates and it shows we are not even close. D’Oh.

We then turn our sights elsewhere. To the clump of trees, where the cache is stashed. R finds it in the roots of a tree. Covered with rocks. It was a real pain in the butt to try and get it out. Pretty neat. It’s a little cammoflaged container. Probably 6 inches in diameter. It had a couple of little baggies in it. One for the log book. Another had a very pretty cameo pin in it. One bag had what looked like a pencil sharpener, a couple of stickers, a hair clip. We didn’t really look too much. I thought I saw a travel bug, but I’m still not sure what they are or how they are used. I didn’t even take it out of the container.

We didn’t take anything or leave anything, I just signed the book. Put everything back the way we found it and headed back to the car. Up the hill.

What a workout. This coming from someone who doesn’t work out AT. ALL. I got back to the car, huffing and puffing. Can you say OUT. OF. SHAPE. (Actually no, I was breathing too heavily.) And this was an easy one. I think I’ll wait until I’m in better shape before I start looking for the hard ones.

But it sure was fun.

And so the adventure... er addiction begins