*Cue the deep raspy voiced movie narrator*
“In a world, where a cleverly stowed paper to sign your name is the game, Where the treasures we seek are every day tupperware containers. Where one man’s old beat up McDonalds toys is a treasure we seek…Where multi-million dollar satellites are used to locate stuff. Where old people sometimes go in the woods and ever come back…I present to you…Geocaching!”
I warn you in advance, I wrote so much and it took me a whole month to compile this…that my editing only took 3 minutes and I have not re-read it. So just bare with me. 🙂
Here are a the caches we found…I hope we succeed, by locating our goal of locating 41 consecutive days of geocaching. Even if it means we go out late at night, or in the dark with only flashlights and head lamps. 🙂 If you rather skip reading here and read my logs instead on geocaching.com instead (my caching name is Deviousdragen).
We found cache disguised under a penny…an “Evil Penny” hidden in the grass in Londonderry. Mike was straight from the doctor’s office being diagnosed with more cellulitis, or the return of what didn’t go away from the previous month. This time on his fingers. It took us a while circling circling panning out, and then finally I came up with the find. Sometimes you need to step back and ponder the possibilities of where you would place it, how you would do it, and bam! 🙂
There was a few caching days where we just found simple park and grab caches that required little effort on our part. “No More Twinkies!!”, “Powder Mill”, “Altair’s Stealth Cache” , “Ezio’s Stealth Cache”, “Turtles X-ing” Some just required a longer drive than needed, since we have out-cached our area. There is a serious need for archiving some old boring caches and replacement of them with some more interesting caches in the area.
2 DNF’s (Did Not Find’s) before locating Omar’s hybrid…It was an ammo can that lead Mike on a wild goose chase. We had Pete and his Nephew Caleb with us on the journey since we were out for ComicCon. The cache was off from it’s coordinates by 150 ft. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but led mike to the center of a Rotary…(NOT SAFE!) We finally made the find in a much safer location.
We event enjoyed ourselves at a few Meet and Greet Events, such as… “M&M Picnic IV”,
The cache “Break for Animals” was found at a rest stop on our drive to Philly. It was a nice location for it looked like we were just lovers hanging around in the gazebo, stretching our legs.
Mike and I went to FossCon (Free and Open Source Software Conference) in Philadelphia. While we were in town we found a few caches. Once cache was located in Love Park, which is a much different place at midnight. We made the mistake of walking though at night. The next afternoon we came back and found “LOVE me, LOVE me” located in love park. Philly had some pretty neat art pieces around town…A giant airplane sculpture all twisted like it crashed in the city, yet inside the cockpit windows is a greenhouse, growing tomatoes. There was also giant larger then life board game pieces and a giant paintbrush
In Philly, there is a cache called “Put Ben to Rest”, which is located over near Ben Franklin’s grave. Let me tell you one thing about Ben Franklin’s grave…They don’t want him escaping. WHOA Nelly! They had a huge thick slab of granite on top of that baby! Not going anywhere is an understatement.
“21CS – 7 – R84EastBound”
One of the nights we left the cache find to almost too late at night…at 10:45 we were out making a search for “Pearl Harbor Survivors”. Which lead to a Search job that involved tow truck operator’s police, and even the owner of the tow company. We parked a bit away from ground zero and walked down the street to the cache, and started to search. The company we parked at was a tow company, with a sign in front of our car that said Surveillance cameras in use…5 minutes into our search and a tow truck pulls up behind our vehicle..and down the road we run…we talk to the man who decided that he didn’t plan on towing, he just was wondering why we were parked, where we probably shouldn’t. We explain what we are up to, we peak his interest, and we park down the street. Not much time later does him and his girlfriend drive over with the tow truck lights a flashing and we explain what caching is. We explain the iphone apps, and how to go about logging the cache. A special operations police officer drives by and asks what the tow guy is up to, and we alert him to the smell of burning plastic, which is infiltrating the neighborhood. The cop takes off to investigate the smell. Even the tow truck operator’s girlfriend is searching. We look and look and say we give up about 3 times before actually almost leave. The owner of the tow truck company shows up and decides that he knew about this being placed there, and didn’t really know what it was, but knew it had something to do with his brother. It was named after his brother who survived the Pearl Harbor Attack. He took off and we keep looking, getting very frustrated we nearly leave, when, I finally make the find. It was very exciting, and I’m glad we could show our new friends what a cache is. We really aren’t crazy! 🙂
As if the previous night wasn’t a challenge enough for us, it was time to find a previous year’s DNF…which I DNFed with Jon St.Pierre. This cache was called “Wood not for building”, is located in a park off of the main road in North Andover. Mike and I, searched in the dark for quite a while. High, low, around, behind, between in every nook and cranny. We finally took a look at the pictures people posted and narrowed the search down from the 2 park benches to one park bench. Then finally, a year after originally searching, I made the find! YAY!!
“FLOOD HAZARD” Park and Grab.
“Not So Pesky” Was a cache on the pesky like pole at a baseball field in Nashua, NH. Very easy find, but I got to go with my big sister Michelle, Which made the find special for me. I decided this day would be one of the few days that we made a find separate from each other, since I had other plans and didn’t want to go in the dark for the 10+ day in a row.
“Solomon Post Memorial”, Back to Nashua for a quick night cache. Literally took as much time to get out of the car as it did to make the find. 🙂 Gotta love those.
This “Meet & Greet at Parker River NWR Visitor Center” that we found was a geocaching event and was held in Newbury, MA…right before Plumb Island. It had a lot of things going on, right before we got there. But we had to wait for me to get out of work and Mike slowly got ready for the event expecting it to go longer. Thankfully, we didn’t miss out on a geopig named “Hemlet”, who made it to the event.
“THE GROTON CASTLE” was pretty neat. I wasn’t really in a hiking mood, but, had Mike pick one and off we went. I was a bit grumpy about the hike up a pretty steep hill, but since it wasn’t raining, it wasn’t slick, and was worth the hike up. When we got to the top there was the remains of an old castle that had once stood in it’s glory over the gorgeous Groton countryside, but now remains a ruined rock walls and tower. No more wooden floors and precious linens to adorn it’s floors and walls. Just merely a shell left.
We also found all these which were pretty standard park and grabs.”There’s Your Sign – NGRT”, “Fiscal Year: Who Cares?”, “Kittredge Park – Lowell Urban Series #3” and “11/11/11 NCISGIRL1’s first hide!”
One pretty interesting geocache adventure involved Our friends Eviltree, Pawtracks, Lepht and Leftyfb when we went to mostly join them on their search for our caches on the boulevard. We also were able to grab a new one that just showed up recently too at the end called “Will you marry me?” As we walked they located our geocaches, and then we continued on the to one at the end. “Will you marry me?” was located on a park bench past the boathouse and we being occupied by a muggle. (A muggle is a person who isn’t a geocacher, and doesn’t have the magic of knowing about it yet. They can be introduced to the game, or just wait for them to leave.) Lepht, who wasn’t sure the rules for muggles walked right up to the guy on the bench and said “Hey Man, Do you mind if me and my friend check for something on your bench?…[he then gets nervous at being so forward and goes…am I allowed to do this…second guessing himself]” The man on the bench Just kinda looks at Lepht and kinda groans, but in a confused state goes, “While i’m sitting here? What is this about?”. So he stood up…Pretty convinced Lepht was going to get punched in the face at the point…We quickly started to explain what geocaching is, and we finally. The guy responded with a “oh, sure, I didn’t realize this was a thing, I’ve never heard of it before. They are everywhere?”. We explained that they were everywhere and explained that we knew this one was here because of the website and that this one is called “Will you Marry Me?” and it’s located on a park bench where a dude came to ask his wife to marry him. This is when the man took a step back and laughed out loud. He goes… “Are you Serious? The reason I’m out here sitting on this bench is because I just got in a fight with my girl who’s been bugging me to ask her to marry her. I’m going back to school and I got 2 years of Graduate school ahead of me and I don’t want to be thinking about it.” We all enjoyed the coincidence that we interrupted a man’s quiet space by the same problem he was having. We wished him good luck and we found the cache and went on our way.
`Watch your step at mine falls`was a fun cache…it took us a while to drive around and find where we needed to park, but once there, we walked right up to the area and I really went out on a limb for this one. Slowly I walking along a dead tree that hung parallel to the water. It was very fun. There was lots of little black fishes in the water.
We went to an event in Groveland called “Lemonade Stand”, put on by our friends HostaHead, Freodobagginz, and their children. It’s always a fun time! This year a man rode up on a horse and trotted though Johnson’s Pond. It was very fun. The man was a non-cacher, but posed for pictures and let the kids pet the horse. Never a dull moment while geocaching!
“Connor’s nano Stealth cache”
“Nasty Little Buggers”
“Terry’s Cherry” Tom’s wife’s name is Terry, I hope he’s ok with us finding her cherry! Wonder if she wants it back? Turns out, it was just a geocache…False alarm!
“Holey Poley”
“Bare Meadow: Woods”
“31 Days of Geocaching Challenge Accepted!!” Was the last day of our 31 days of geocaching…and a good reason to celebrate! Even though, we plan on finding 10 more days of geocaching.
“T Time P&G” Thanks for placing this quick find in Reading Tom…If only the drive was quicker 🙂
I found a very interesting cache called “Pull My Finger” which was a finger poking out of a knot in a tree deep in the woods. In order to retrieve the cache, you had to pull the finger which pulled the cache attached out of the tree knot. While Mike and I were hiking out the the cache/crossing the stream we heard what sounded like a big animal in the woods. Mike said it looked like a big dog. I was happy that it was scared of us and ran away.
Boula’s Playground was a much longer walk in the Chelmsford Limestone Quarry, but it was a nice walk, if it wasn’t for the mosquitoes.
Castle Quest was my friend Nicol’s first cache!! I’m so glad she got to come visit from England!! 🙂 We went on so many adventures and found a variety of things.
#1 – The Salem Witch Trials Cache we found with Nicol on the 2nd day of her trip visiting us. It was so nice to get out to see parts of Salem, MA! Interestingly enough, this cache was located in the witch trials part of the cemetery. The whole time we were there, the camera refused to take pictures. It would fire off one photo before locking up and refusing to take another until we turned it off and back on again. None of the pictures were of anything interesting, no smiling faces, or the ground. Very interesting. Once we left the cemetery, the camera took pictures again. Coincidence?
“Collins Cove Cache” and “North River”, were also located in Salem, MA and a short walk from the cemetery. These caches were both a good example for Nicol as to what a guard rail cache is, she got to see two types a magnetic bolt, and a tupperware container with a snake skin camouflage. Tricky! 🙂 I wouldn’t grab the snake skin colored one, because in the past, I’ve located a cache that was topped with a real snake. EEK!
We also took her to find “Angelfield” which was a quick virtual cache in a cemetery near Boston. This cache was to go to the location, there was no box to find or anything to sign. The cache placer wanted you to go up in the spire that is open between certain hours and see the view, but if you couldn’t go up, you can still log the find. 🙂
The next day, was already time to take Nicol back to the airport, she gotta stay longer next time! So we spent the morning in Quincy Market Place, and walked through Faneuil Hall. After doing the loop I was thinking…Humm…I wonder if there is a cache nearby, as it turns out “Oh, the Brutalism!” Was the nearest. It should have been easier, but I ignored my instinct and looked high and low and around and between and beyond the point where I should have. I couldn’t fathom why with all the park benches it would be located what appeared to be so close to the road. Turns out it was on the sidewalk on a street sign. Exactly on the map, where it said it would be. Darn!
Here are a few more that we found…
“Red, White and Yellow – NH #3”
“Ultima Ratio Regis”
“Reservoir Runner”
“Riverwalk Park”
“kTom’s Backscratcher #1″ This one was put out by the cacher who was the inspiration for my 41 days of caching, instead of 30 days…I wonder if she ever placed a 41 days of caching challenge cache?
YAY!! We found 41 Days of Geocaching!!
Not all caches have an epic story to go with them, But, next time I drive past them, in the back of my mind I’ll say…”FOUND IT!!” and give myself a mental *High Five*
The next goal is to find a cache every missing day on the calendar (Regardless of year). So we’ve found a cache already on 9/13, but we haven’t on 9/14, 9/15 and 9/16, so we will find a cache on those days. We went and did so many amazing things this past month!
If you actually read this whole thing….Congratulations, you succeeded at doing something far harder than finding one geocache a day for a course of 41 consecutive days.