Caching In

Yesterday I went geocaching in the big cross country course just behind our apartment, and while I have a few battle scars in the form of bug bites and scrapes from thornbushes, and even though I did not actually find the final cache I was looking for, I still deem the hunt a success. Since getting my Garmin Venture HC GPS about a month ago I have taken it on a handful of geocache hunts, most of which were successful, but yesterday's solo trip was a bit different because I had to go it alone. I did not have the wisdom or experience of my brothers Phil and Tom to guide me--only the GPS and a few basic hints from geocaching.com.

The cache I set out to find was a multi-part cache, which means the first find is actually a set of coordinates for another find, which is a set of coordinates to another find. After finding the location of Part 1, I spent nearly 10 minutes looking for the coordinates marker, and finally saw it--a 2" square piece of wood attached to a tree branch by a piece of wire. The second destination was a little trickier to get to, but the coordinates marker was brilliant: a decoy pigeon attached to a tree branch, 50 feet from the cross country trail. No way passers-by would ever find it, and if they did they would just see a bird sitting in a tree and think no more of it (that's what I enjoy the most about geocaching: finding things hidden, like autobots, in plain sight).

The third and final marker was a little more tricky, and I didn't actually locate it, though I do have the coordinates and will try again when the weather isn't so hot and the mosquitoes aren't so hungry. So all in all I spent at least an hour walking around some beautiful countryside and found two out of three things I was looking for. Not a bad way to spend the afternoon.

Before going to bed on Friday night I purchased an ad on facebook for Walking Taco. So far nearly 4,000 people have seen it and 0 people have clicked on it. :) It's a learning exercise for me, though, and because I don't pay unless someone clicks, I'm out nothing. Not a bad deal, really, and who knows...maybe something will happen before the ad runs its course by the middle of the week. We'll see.