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!

Double Your Fun

Really?  REALLY?  Really!!

August 2, 2012 - Our first cache in the dog days of August.  Actually the days around here have been dog days for most of the summer--whatcha gonna do?  Go caching!  So this was the last of the Imposter series for us to finish up.  [Ed note:  So I THOUGHT!  Another Imposter was just published on August 5 so apparently this series is ongoing.] We were pretty confident that we'd have no problem at all with this one considering the last Imposter of the series (#2) which we thought was crazy hard!  So we took off for the spot--just three of us.  Two Lorax's and a Jenner for the hide.  The hint given was "not your typical LPC (lamp post cache)."  And that couldn't have been truer.

We did the whole "look under the skirt of the lamp post thing" to no avail.  There were bushes all around the area and we looked extensively in those.  There were dozens of old bottles, empty beer cans, a wine bottle, a dirty diaper (gag!) and empty, crumpled up cigarette packs.  We pushed those around for awhile, but nothing popped out at us.

We even look at other lamp posts to see if the one we were concentrating on was like the other ones.  Were they all painted recently, did that one have a box on the back like ours did, stuff like that.  I drew the line at climbing the post, though.  :)

Not THAT desperate for a chew!

Then, all of a sudden, I saw a clump of chewed up gum.  No....it couldn't be...no way.  I poked it with my trusty stick and turned it over.  There was the micro sticking out of the bottom.  Evil genius!  Devious beyond measure!  Disgusting!  I love it.  So, we finished the Imposter series with a flourish and we did indeed, double our fun!

Undercover Cache

Seriously???  And what does D3Y mean?

July 30, 2012 -- With the success of finding Happy we decided to take a chance on one of our most devious DNFs.  The cache behind the shopping center.  We knew it was an "imposter cache" but it was listed as 1 for terrain (very true) and 1 for difficulty.  Very NOT true.  I suppose if you were used to seeing these types of caches, maybe it would've been easier, but for the neo-geo, this kind of thing is not an ordinary cache.  AND we'd already done two of the other imposters in the series.  There is a fourth, but we really haven't tried for that one yet.  The other two were as tough as this one but had a difficulty of 2.5.  I think this one should've been at least that difficulty as well.  So back to the same site we'd already been to two other times.  Luckily we had no muggles nearby, but unluckily, the dumpsters REALLY needed to be emptied.  There was a total sickly rotted smell coming from them.  Like rotting fish.  Ugh!  It was hard to stay focused when that smell was wafting around the area.  Could it be a rock, a stick, a leaf, a switch box, a lock, a branch??  We were all being driven crazy.  I circled the area several times, then finally for some reason I started to pull at the stickers on the electrical box.  One seemed to pull off very easily.  Lo and behold UNDERNEATH the magnetic sticker that had the letters DY3 on it was the cache which consisted of a very tiny plastic bag and a strip of paper for a log.  Why did I mess with the sticker?  I don't know.  But there you go, it was indeed "in plain sight" as the hint said, but who would think to look under a series of nonsensical letters and numbers on a piece of equipment.  It just looked like a code for the big box.  Imposter, indeed!

Happy to have Happy

Our new recruit was the eagle eye that found it.

 July 30, 2012 - This one was a long time coming.  We were attempting to finish up the Snow White cache.  We still had Happy, Doc, and Sleepy to go.  Happy was very elusive for us.  We'd tried for Happy once before and spent close to an hour looking for him to no avail.  There were five sets of eyes, but no one could find him.  Needless to say, none of us were very---happy----about not finding Happy.  When two of your party of five start whining about going home and not looking any more you need to cut your losses and move on.  So we did.  Fast forward about two weeks.  I had this cache on my watchlist.  I had tried to email the owner about the cache to make sure that the big storm at the end of June didn't mess up the cache.  I never heard back from the CO so I put it on the watchlist.  FINALLY, yesterday, someone found it!  Of course, as with most cachers, the findee was lazy about his log.  He wrote Good hike, nice trail,

The hidden cache

Where we THOUGHT it probably was (or underneath all that)

TFTC.  No info whatsoever.  Thanks.   I like when people write something that helps me out just a little bit, like -- tricky hide or not exactly where the GZ coords are, something like that.  Oh well.  At least someone had finally found it.  I called my geocaching buddies to coordinate a new rescue mission.  They were up for it and so was I.  One of our group declined to go, but he's a teenager so I'm so not surprised.  Back to the same spot.  The GPS was still consistent in where it was leading us. The thing that threw us off the most was the fact that it was sending us to an area nearby that was just devastated by the storm.  Lots of trees down, leaves, branches, sticks, etc.  We thought that maybe the cache was in the tree and was now underneath all that mess.  The find by the fellow geocacher yesterday gave us the renewed hope we needed to give it another shot.  In the midst of us once again discussing where it could be--arguing about whether or not it could be up a tree, our eagle eyed friend was saying, "Excuse me, excuse me.  I think I may have found it."  Finally we all turned around and there he was, cache in hand, with Happy smiling like a Cheshire cat, and so was our buddy!  GREAT FIND!  So we can check that off our list of "can't find but we'll be back - CFBWBB"  Still have a couple more on that list, but Happy is not one of them!

The Lorax Gang and our new recruit celebrating the find.

Johns Stash Cache - Not a Cache and Dash

Dear sister with her web whacking wand

THAT'S A STUMP?

July 29, 2012 -- Yowzah!  Okay, first of all, again, I did NOT read the car coordinates at first.  So we drove and parked to where I thought we should start.  But there was no entry spot into the woods and you can't just go tromping through somebody's yard (although I have done that, but ONLY as a last resort when The Lorax Gang and I were hopelessly lost and it was getting dark) but I digress.  Anyway, we came back to the car, reread the coordinates for parking, put the coordinates into our car GPS and went there. Again, not a good place as far as I'm concerned.  We got as far as a horse trail and turned around since there was no way to get INTO the woods unless we had had hacksaws and axes.  We didn't.  Finally we went to a deadend road and it showed us as being about 800 ft. away.  Perfect.  So we went into the woods and started walking.  Okay, we ended up in someone's yard and then came back and followed the GPS.  It did tend to bounce quite a bit due to the tree cover, but FINALLY we got to within about 20 ft.  A BIG thanks for the hints, fellow geocachers, otherwise I know this would have been a DNF for me and my sister!   But we did find it and swapped out an Avenger bouncy ball for a soccer ball.  Of course, the inevitable happened afterwards--once again I couldn't find our way back to the car. We ended up having to use my iPhone Google maps to find our way back. So basically we needed three different GPS units to accomplish this cache! God I love technology!!!

Victoria Sprung

Sister dear with her very first find

July 29, 2012 -- Since my dear husband and son went to an Orioles game today and the Lorax Gang was busy I was going to be on my own--unless I could convince my dear sister to accompany me.  Since she's been retired for all of one month, she jumped at the chance to go.  She's up for any kind of adventure as long as it doesn't include any type of WORK -- fun only for her -- at least for awhile.  So we started slow with a cache one street over from where she lives.  She was surprised, as most new geocachers are, to find that there are caches right in your own backyard--so to speak.  Once you start, you find that they are just about everywhere these days (well, in highly populated areas, that is).  As usual, though, I got myself and my sister lost while trying to track it down. We went through one set of woods before coming out and realizing it was in another set of woods. In the second set of woods it was really easy to find. I have to agree with the recent logger who says this one needs maintenance. There was water in the container. No holes, but the top really doesn't fit well. Sister dear was excited at the adventure of it all.  We left an Avenger bouncy ball and took a monkey toy. TFTC!!! k back to the car because, of course, I parked much farther away than I had to.  THIS is how I end up getting so much exercise from geocaching.  The cache is in need of some maintenance because it was wet in the cache.  The top didn't really fit very well on the cache.  A new container is probably in order for this one.

Easy Cache -- Easy Money

Signing the log

Cache among the rocks

Rocks, rocks, and more rocks is right!

July 28, 2012 -- This was the second cache that we found on this day.  I had originally gone for a completely different cache, but no matter where we went on the path, we didn't seem to be gettinjg any closer.  So we decided to give up our initial cache and just go for the two closer ones.  The first cache was relatively simple to find (see previous log). This was more of a challenge but after awhile you get a sixth sense about where geocachers are going to hide their caches.  The hint was about rocks and it was a good hint! We  left a basketball squishy ball and took a Cars notebook. We liked the log book.  The title of the cache makes sense now.  Of course, our hardest cache of the day was still ahead of us -- finding our way back to our car.  I really, REALLY have to figure out how to use waypoints on my GPS.   It would certainly help in times like these.  We did find our car without HUGE problems.  Knowing that both dear husband and I both have no sense of direction, the waypoints would be a huge help.  That's my next challenge in my geocaching career.