Before yesterday, I had never had a full day by myself to cache. I have done the bulk of my caching on short trips during lunch break at work, and even on the weekends I can sometimes squeeze an hour or two at most. 95% of the time I have other, "more important" things to do, or plans with Emily and Jack. The closest I've ever come to a whole day caching was one of the days we spent at the shore back in August. Even then I may have had about 4 hours caching time, and I had to check in with the family a few times - they're beach people, I'm not, so they spent the day on the beach while I cached.
Yesterday was different. I had time to myself from 8:30 until 5:30, so I spent the entire time caching.
I submitted my first few caches right before I left the house, and while I was on the computer I noticed that a new multi cache showed up right down the road from Video Game History #2 - Frogger, and that nobody had found it yet. With my odds of getting an FTF being pretty good, I drove the 3 minutes over to Hangin' Here Watchin' The Trains and made the find. Both parts of the multi were within walking distance, so I was in and out of there with the FTF within 10 minutes, tops. Not that I was going to take it as an omen or anything, but this bode well for the rest of the day, and it was my second FTF within a week!
I have been spending a lot of time on the Geocaching web site looking into areas with high concentrations of caches, so my plan was to go toward a few of these spots, picking up anything else that popped up on my GPS on the way. Indian Orchard Park in Middletown is about a 10-15 minute drive from home with 6 caches listed within its borders, so I headed in that direction, picking up Taylor's Cache on the way.
Indian Orchard Park consists of a series of hiking trails right off of Rt. 352. The park itself is about 1/4 mile off the road, and I never would have known it existed without reading the cache descriptions. This also bode well for the day, as I love finding places that are off the beaten path a bit. The park itself is worthy of more love, so I'll post a location review for it sometime in the future, after I go back and get some decent pictures of the place.
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| On Google Maps, just search for Copes Lane off of Rt. 352 |
Dumb move.
I went about 100 feet before everything became incredibly overgrown. Being the abnormally large guy that I am, I decided that I could just walk over any undergrowth. That worked well enough to get me stuck even farther in the undergrowth and thickets. Still feeling upbeat, and now realizing that it would take a lot of effort to go back to where I left the trail, I decided to press on.
Dumb move.
40 minutes of bushwhacking later, I finally reached GZ, and then spent about 10 minutes of crawling around rotten logs looking for the cache. After my little trek through the woods there was no freaking way I was gonna leave here without logging it, even if it meant that I needed to live there and feed on berries and wild animals to survive. I had spotted a box turtle a little while back and marked the location on my GPS, just in case...
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| Poor little thing had no idea how close it came to becoming lunch. I even planned to make primitive survival tools out of its shell. |
I only had two more caches to find in the park before leaving, and both of them were pretty easy. I did't have any more weird urges to leave the trail or anything, so I guess I learned my lesson.
After leaving the park, I drove right down the road to a quick cache and dash LPC. I know that some people get all hateful about LPCs, but personally, I have absolutely no problem with them. Sure, I wish some of them were a little more creative, but honestly, it puts caches in places that otherwise would have no other suitable option. After sweating out about 3 pounds of water weight on a misguided hike through the woods, this was just what the doctor ordered.
I picked up a few more local hides before heading down toward Delaware. I took a quick stop in Aston to pick up one of my DNFs from when I was first starting out - Ice Ice Baby. Wow, this is another one of those situations where a little experience made a world of difference. My first time there had been about two weeks after I started caching, and I spent a solid 20 minutes looking for it. This time, it took me all of 45 seconds to grab it. I was much more dependent on GPS (or in that case, Google Maps) back then and am now used to expanding my search a bit.
On the way down to Delaware I stopped by BAAAH HUMBUG!!!, which had been another DNF from back in August. This one has a lot of favorite points, and the logs imply that it is very tricky. Damn, they weren't kidding. I spent about 20 minutes looking around GZ, pretending that my GPS was a cell phone (it's still better than my actual "cell phone") when the workers from the nearby restaurant came outside to take their smoke breaks.
I was on the verge of leaving when a stray bit of sunlight reflected off of something I needed to see. 30 seconds later, cache in hand, I was laughing maniacally and signing the log. This one had been bugging me for two months, so I was thrilled to have picked it up.
I made the short trip to Delaware and picked up two more easy caches, and then headed home for the evening. All told, I found 16 caches, and only had one (expected) DNF. Not bad for a solo newbie cacher!
Caches found (or not) on October 18th:
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