Geocaching

Old Guys Almost Rule

1) Fifty-nine year-old Tom Watson almost won the British Open.

2) Thirty-seven year-old Lance Armstrong couldn’t hang with Alberto, but still is in 2nd place in the GC.

3) Fifty-three year-old Brian Bogardus can only seem to find half of the geocaches he is looking for.

Brian_the_Red found The Retirement Cache (Traditional Cache)
We were 2 for 2 on the Odell Weeks caches tonight after a pizza dinner at Ferrandos. Nicely done on the hide, been wondering when we would see one of these in action.

Brian_the_Red found Love Sports-Hook, Line and Sinker (Traditional Cache)
We were 2 for 2 on the Odell Weeks caches tonight after a pizza dinner at Ferrandos. We had never attempted these 2 at the Weeks Center for fear they would be right along the walking track and awfully hard to get stealth-fully. But we were pleasantly surprised that they were far enough away as to be easy to not get muggled.

Brian_the_Red couldn’t find “SECTION” (Unknown Cache)
Sometimes you get the cache and sometimes the cache gets you.

This one has got us stumped, we just can’t find stage 1. The cache owner has confirmed we solved the code right, so our coordinates are correct and he even gave us a small clue…

They say it takes a big man to admit defeat, well tonight I am a very big man.

Brian_the_Red couldn’t find Valor is a Virtue (Unknown Cache)
Didn’t get a chance to find the cache yesterday as we got a late start with this one and ran out of light to finish solving for the coordinates.

Came back today and went hunting for the cache. We spent quite a bit of time hiding in the bushes avoiding the surprising amount of cars driving by. While we were in there we looked with no success.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

More Geocache Logging Fun

Had a fun day caching today, so in lieu of an actual blog post here, I’ll let you in on what I have written in the logs of a couple caches from today.

Chicken-or-the-Egg (Multi-cache)
After our monthly breakfast meeting just down the street at the new Gary’s Hamburger place we coerced 2 other couples from the MMC to join us for the hunt. Figured with the difficulty level (4 out of 5) we could use all the eyes we could get. Turns out I spotted it right after some one else just walked by the spot.

Thanks for bringing us here. Mazda actually experimented with a hydrogen fueled Miata with a rotary engine a decade ago. Nothing ever came of it, but if it had I could have filled up here (if they took Visa.)

Attack of the Clones – 2 (Traditional Cache)
Easy grab.The only clones we saw were the look alike homes and they left us alone because my wife sat in the landspeeder and used her Jedi powers to project the thought, “These aren’t the cachers you want.”

Does it Shine? (Traditional Cache)
We usually don’t do these that say, “located on private property” as they make us nervous, but we were in the neighborhood and on a roll, so we gave this one a try.

We stopped the car and sat for a moment, my wife got up her courage first and got out. After about a minute of looking, a voice from the heavens spoke to her, “You are almost touching it!” Odd, I have always thought of God as male, but this was a powerful female voice. Already skittish, we almost bolted, but Donna took it as a challenge and looked some more. Embolded by her bravery I joined her in her dancing around the light pole.

My first instinct was to inspect the nearby Bellsouth junction box and obviously a lot of others thought so too, as the cover was partially off, but that probably wasn’t it, per an earlier log. A lot of cachers also thought it might be behind a shiny silver SCE&G plaque that identified this particular pole, as it was partially pried off. As we were about to quit and drive off with our GPSr between our legs, God sent an angel our way with a hint.

Sure enough, as it has been so far all weekend, my wife was right on about the location and I managed to talk her out of it, then spend unnecessarily minutes looking elsewhere before ending up right where she first pointed.

In this little drama the part of the angel was played by the cache owner who gave us a big clue, while the part of God was performed by his elderly mother that lives with him and was looking out the front window. Disrespect to any religion, living or dead, was not intended and is purely coincidental.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Logging A Cache

When you find a cache, to have it count, you are required to sign the log book in the cache. This varies from just date & initials on a tiny rolled up piece of paper in a Micro to a complete description of the hunt and what items you traded out on a 4 x 6 notebook in an ammo can.

Afterwards it is suggested you go online to geocaching.com and fill out an electronic log on the cache’s page. This has the advantage of giving you plenty of space to write no matter what the physical size of the container.

One of the caches we found today had us stumped on our first two attempts to find it on Tuesday and Thursday of this week. I’ll let the online logs tell the story:

July 14 by Brian_the_Red (131 found)
Another in a long string of DNFs for us. We would like to blame it on the approaching darkness, but it wasn’t that dark yet. Oh, what the heck, we couldn’t find it because it was dark. That’s it. It was dark. We’ll come back another day.

July 16 by Brian_the_Red (131 found)
Today is another day. This time we were a little earlier getting here. We would like to blame this miss on the fact that it was light out, and it was still pretty light. Oh, what the heck, we couldn’t find it because it was daylight. That’s it. The sun got in our eyes.

July 17 by Brian_the_Red (131 found)
You know how at the cine-plex, after you’ve finished that giant bucket of popcorn covered with a butter-like substance, you spend the rest of the movie working your tongue around near a back molar trying to get that piece of kernel out from between your tooth and gum? Well, that’s what this cache was.

We had tried late in the day, we had tried earlier, the only time left to try was high noon. That is when we were out in the parkway of Sumter St SE today. The GPSr was acting all weird on us at first and had us standing in front of the 7′ wall surrounding the house on the corner. I knew this couldn’t be it, so I rebooted the GPSr. This time it led us to a slightly different spot than the last two attempts.

As I stood there intently staring, looking for something that seemed out of place, my wife chimed in from behind me, “There it is!”
Me: “Huh?”
Her: “Right in front of you!”
Me: “Where?”
Her: “Right there!”
Me: “Huh?”
Her, putting her finger right on it: “THERE!”
Me: “Oh.”
Me & Her: “Ooooh, clever.”

Plugged in the 2nd stage coordinates and off we went. At GZ it took only a minute or so for our finely tuned ammo can radar to spot the hide. Took a Curious George rolling thing and left behind a blue headed Alien toy.

TFTF (Thanks For The Fun)

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Shoulda Stayed Home

After watching the TDF Donna talked me into going on a quick geocaching run. The first one was a multi-stage cache in a small park. It was on our remedial cache list so it was an ammo can, but we didn’t see that the first stage was a nano, AKA itty bitty!! Donna found the nano on the second pass and it held the coords for the second stage ammo can. We then spent the next 15 minutes poking around where it should have been without success. Dang another DNF.

Throwing caution to the wind, we headed off to the next nearest cache .6 miles away. It was not on the easy list, in fact it was one of those pesky 35mm film canister well integrated into the environment. And it stayed that way. DNF number two.

There was one more multi on the way home with the second stage being an ammo can. At least the first stage was bigger than a film canister. All the logs showed that this was a unique hide and the GPSr lead us first to a crape myrtle and then to a second one about 10 feet away, but poke as we might we once again came up empty. Another 0 for 3 night.

Watch ebay for a used and quite possibly inaccurate Garmin eTrex Venture HC. 😉

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 296

This Is Either Madness…Or Brilliance

Geocaching Mirror TagTo quote that famous philosopher, Captain Jack Sparrow, “It’s remarkable how often those two traits coincide.”

This is either the lamest thing ever I have ever come across related to geocaching, or the coolest.*

Imagine you are driving down a back country road looking for a cache. Your navigator is in the right seat watching the readout on the GPSr. The direction arrow is pointing straight ahead and the mileage to your target is dropping steadily. Two miles, mile and a half, under one now. Point five, less than a quarter mile, so you ease off the gas. The numbers continue to decrease and once you get below a tenth of a mile the display swaps to showing the distance to your target in feet. Four hundred, 250, less than eighty and the needle is starting to point a little to the right. BAM! Twenty four feet and the compass needle points 90° to the right. You slam on the brakes and steer quickly to the side of the road and succeed in getting almost all the way off the pavement. Both of your heart rates have ticked up a notch. “Hurry, its got to be in that small patch of woods,” she tells you.

“Oh wait a minute dear,” you reply, “Where is that placard? We need to put that on the mirror in case anyone comes along so they’ll know what we are doing.” Riiight.

* I actually printed on of these out and laminated it. My intention was to hang it from the mirror of the Emperor and snap a photo just to have a picture for this post. But I never got around to it.

If you think this is brilliant, get your own at the Geocacher’s University. (also available in French)

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 293

Another DNF

Nope, didn’t go geocaching today. Nor yesterday either for that matter. The F in this case stands for finish, not find. We started to watch a movie from 2001 called Happy Accidents that stars Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio, but stopped after 15 minutes. It seems like we are on a streak here with not finishing movies. In the last six weeks we have received 16 discs from Netflix and we have DNF’d 6 of them or almost 38%. The ratio is even worse because there were 6 discs of West Wing which are golden to us, so if we forget about WW the ratio jumps to 60%!

The search for good movies for us is kind of like geocaching. The stars of the movie are the coordinates and the blurb on the Netflix page is the cache description. Roger Ebert’s Review is the hint and all those reviews on the Netflix movie page equate to the logs of fellow geocachers. With all that information, finding a good movie should be easy, but sometimes you just can’t see it.

The car has sat in the garage all day because we rode the tandem around town early this morning paying 3 bills and saving $1.32, so I was going to title this post “The Emperor’s Day Off”, but there is now a possibility that we may have to make a run to the store for some essentials that were missed the other day when we did our weekly grocery shopping.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 292

Untitled

Stage 8 of the TDF resulted in zero change at the top of the leader board. Old Man Lance is still in third place 8 seconds out. We are in the Pyrenees Mountains, but today and tomorrow’s stages are the kind that probably won’t determine who will win the Tour, but can decide who will lose it. While there are two or more big ass climbs on the stage, they don’t end at the tops, there are 30 to 40 miles of downhill & flats before the finish line allowing any of the contenders who is dropped on the climb to catch back up.

Appears that some of the blog’s theme CSS conflicts with the theme stuff that is produced by the stats generator and I’m not smart enough to know if there is an easy fix and don’t want to spend the time, so I took the easy way out. Just click on this link – Geocaching Statistics

I guess it is OK to blog about this because the FRS apparently don’t need me to jinx tonight’s victory over the supposedly lousy Kansas City Royals because right now their relief pitching is busily snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. When John Smoltz left the game after pitching 5 solid innings they had a 9 to 1 lead. KC scored 5 runs in the sixth. Now after a solo homer in the 7th they have a men on first and second with nobody out, so now the current batter represents the go ahead run!

At the pool party with the MMC this morning it was pointed out to me that I had misspelled retirement in my countdown widget in the right sidebar. What happened here, either all of my readers are as bad as I am when it comes to spelling or you all enjoyed watching me humiliate myself with the Internet equivalent of toilet paper stuck on the bottom of my shoe.

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 292