Now that it has cooled down a bit and the leaves have begun to fall in earnest it is once again perfect weather for Geocaching.
We went out of town a few weeks back so my wife could visit with her relatives so the boy and I went and hit some caches around central Virginia. The following Saturday he asked if we could go again so we spent the day cruising around our stomping grounds and finding what we could find. A lot of new caches had popped up since I had last gone so it didn’t take too long to find an area that was dense enough where we wouldn’t be doing more riding around than walking.
He loves his backpack. Lots of pockets mean lots of places to stuff snail shells, sea shells, cool leaves, cooler stones, and about a bazillion acorns.
Hiking through the woods with the six-year-old is a blast. He is more jazzed about finding waterlogged, broken dollar-store trinkets in a muddy sandwich container under a rotten log than any sane person really has the right to be, and that energy is super-infectious. Also, he is tenacious without being ridiculous about it. That is, he’s not a quitter but he knows when to give up when we can’t find what we are looking for. As the great philosopher W.C. Fields once said “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no sense being a damn fool about it.”
“Besides, we can always come back some other time, right, dad?” “You bet.”
It’s not entirely about the stuff in the caches, really, or even finding them at all (we are about 75% successful). For both of us the coolest part is the hunt and exploring along the way. For example, the picture you see in the upper left of this post is a California Redwood tree that someone transplanted to the middle of downtown Suffolk, Virginia in 1954. It was my first time ever seeing one and I doubt I would have ever known it was there if I hadn’t been looking for geocache number GC2319B. (If you are reading this, TFTC, SN&P!)
Odd nooks of public land sit awkwardly in areas you would never expect. Tiny jetties forty feet wide and a tenth of a mile long jut out into protected swamplands all over the place here – just park on the street and walk a “trail to nowhere” for a really rewarding view even if you aren’t rewarded by finding a cache. It’s weird to be able to stand less than 75 yards from a CVS drugstore and still be enveloped by nature (pics below).
That tree in the second photo had about two dozen vultures in it… just silently watching us not fall down and die, I guess. Off-putting, sure, but cool nonetheless.
Rook Update: The rook I put into a geocache forever ago (see pic in sidebar) is now in South Wales. It has traveled 10,000 miles since it was turned into a Travel Bug by the people who found it 16 months ago. I am not sure what the owners have in store for it after it completes its “tour of Scottish castles” but I am thinking about offering to trade the D20 cache container I made for it should the little guy ever make it back to the States. The D20 is (still) sitting in my garage taking up space and I (still) have no desire to be a CO for it. Nonetheless I would really like to see it used “out there somewhere”.
Geojunk Clock Update: Although a couple of pieces of the geocache treasure that had been hot-glued to it have fallen off, the clock is still ticking away as expected. After 300+ caches, though, real-estate on it is at a premium so I might be forced to come up with a solution for what to do with new cache finds sooner than later.
Also, I only have a couple of handfuls of the cipher discs and the little fish I made to trade so it will soon be time to plan for replacements. Not sure what I will build next, but I doubt it will be puzzle-related.
Maybe something with invisible ink, though… Hmmm…
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