First to Find!

At the mouth of the culvert

Looking down the culvert

August 04, 2012 -

Saturday's.  This is how they usually go...  "What do you want to do?"  "Geocache.  What do YOU want to do?"  "I dunno.  Maybe go to a wine festival.  Maybe go biking.  Maybe go to a festival or craft show or something?  What do you think?" "I want to go geocaching."  "Okay, but maybe we can do something ALONG with geocaching."  "Okay, deal."   At that point, dear husband gets on the internet to figure out what's going on in our general vicinity.  Once he figures out what looks like fun and I agree, I hop on Geocaching.com to figure out what geocaches are near to where the "thing" is that we are doing.  Today was an absolute win-win in terms of synchronicity.  So he found this winery in Mt. Airy that had a wine and cheese pairing going on and I found a BRAND NEW geocache that had just been published the day before.  It would be our very first "FTF."  And THAT is exciting!  It's akin to being the first to scale Mt. Everest, or the first to step foot on the moon, or the first to discover a new medicine---okay, no, it's not really like that at all.  But it is cool and some caches are specifically set aside for FTFers only, so I guess now that I have one under my belt, I can try those caches, too.  It was a goal that I wanted to attain and today I had a chance to do so.  

A fresh new, very tainted scrape.  Ugh.

So we took off for Mt. Airy.  We used our car GPS to put in the coordinates for parking, but it had us going to wrong area for the cache.  We read the description again and figured out where we should be parking and headed there.  We parked and got out near our quarry.  We were on the top of a small overpass that had a culvert underneath it and a creek running through the culvert.  The GPS had us about 16 ft. from the cache at the top of the culvert.  Keep in mind that the title of the cache was "Birthday for Crawdaddies."  And there were crawdads in the creek.  Yep, we had to make our way down to the creek, which was NOT easy at all.  There was a small portion of land that was mowed short but everything around the water was very high grass with God knows what lurking in it.  As usual, I had on shorts and tennis shoes. And as usual, I got a mighty nasty scrape from a bramble on the front of my leg.  Sadly, I didn't even feel it happen.  That's how used to getting scraped up I am.

Just hanging around

Steve decided to try and come in from the other side.  I'm not sure how much of an easier time he had, but he didn't end up with wet shoes like I did.  He actually walked through the culvert.  We started searching on the side we THOUGHT it was going to be, but coming up empty handed.  I was starting to panic a bit thinking that someone else was going to come to try to find it to get their own FTF as we were still frantically looking ourselves.  I decided to go over to the other side of the creek (getting my feet COMPLETELY soaked in the meantime).  Sheesh.  So Steve is on one side pulling up large rocks to looking under them, and I'm on the other side, poking in the underbrush with a stick and hoping that the Basilisk isn't hovering around in the grasses.  Then I see this small crevice that I'm convinced the cache will be in.  I turn to get a flashlight from my pack when what do I spy hanging from the branch of a little sapling on a caribiner, but the CACHE!!!  I hastily grabbed it and opened it quickly.

A fresh new untainted log.  Ahhhhhhh.

And what do I find???????????    A blank log book.  A beautifully blank log book.  So nice and clean and white.  Nary a name on it.  With shaking hands, I wrote in the log with the enclosed pencil:  "FTF!!!!  The Jenners 3  TFTC!  Our first FTF!  So excited!"  Or something along those lines.  Then, little paranoid me, I decided that I had to write over it with INK just in case someone else got here before I could log my cache on geocaching.com and they erased my entry!  It could happen!  So I was just finishing up the inking of my entry when I heard voices coming from the road above us.  "Honey!  Do you hear that?"  I figured it was another geocacher trying to get the FTF!  I felt awkward and just wanted to get out of there.  Then this voice says, "Are you the first to find?"  And I said proudly, "I am !"  Then he said, "Congratulations!  I put the cache here yesterday and I was bringing her (pointing to the woman he was with) here to show her where I placed it.  It was in honor of her birthday which was yesterday."  So he was the cache OWNER!  How cool is that??  I thought to myself, this could not be any better. To meet the cache owner at the very time you  get your first "First to Find."  How poetic!  It was really, really cool and they could not have been any nicer.  So Zekester and Simon, you guys are awesome!  We hope to do more of your caches in the future and thanks for making our first FTF so memorable and great!  We took the "lovers in a tryst" - Popeye and Olive Oyl dolls hugging each other, and left a cool Matchbox car for the SECOND to find!  All  in all, a fantastic day for geocaching!