Friday, January 06, 2006

addiction

Monday was a great day, no work, so abe and I decided to go on a mini hike and find some new geocaches in the area. So early afternoon we headed out and found a mountain to climb - only half a mile up the hill and then back down, a really good 1 mile hike. The workout felt so good. We have been so bad about not hiking the way we used to. While we were driving to the next cache I was working on the solution to a puzzle to one of the caches - like the new sudoko puzzles that are everywhere right now. I solved the puzzle, but it was too late, abe had to be up early (12 AM) to go to work. I called Suzy the next day to see if they had solved this puzzle and see if they wanted to join us on a caching adventure. They had the solution - thanks to a friend of hairball. So we planned a trip to CG on Thursday early afternoon. We also had a few other puzzles to solve and find in the area.

We attempted to find one cache, but I knew that my solution was based on a vivid imagination. Nothing there, but it could have been. Then we worked on one that Suzy and Morris had worked on for quite awhile. We found three clues and headed off to the cache. After arriving in the middle of a field (on private property) we knew that we had something wrong. Morris checked the math for the coordinates and he found an error. Back four miles, the same four miles we had just driven, to the hill on the water tank. We drove around to the back and started climbing up, the gps told us it was on the "no trespassing" side of the fence, but we weren't going to be denied again. After slipping, sliding, endangering our lives we climbed to where the gps zeroed out. We looked for a really long time and then decided that we had something wrong. Carefully going back to the car we managed to not kill ourselves.

I took the paper with the information and found two little errors that Morris missed. Minor details like 4+2 = 2 ( I had subtracted, not added) . So moving on to the cache that we knew we could find. The sun was beginning to set and we had to drive 8 miles into the wilderness to find the cache. We parked as close as we could to the cache and then hiked the little bit to find the nicely hidden ammo box in the pile of rocks- aka an Arizona Cache.

Abe mentioned that geocaching was the one activity that would cause us to hike and climb places that we wouldn't otherwise, just say there is a cache and Suzy and I are ready to go and scale the alps.

So now that we have found almost 400 caches, we should be tired of this sport right? I went to the site to log in our find from yesterday and noticed that there is a new one in Casa Grande, just this morning. How soon before we can jump in the car and find this one........

Part two, I called Suzy and at 3 PM we ran back to CG to not only get the one cache we missed yesterday, we hit the new one. 100% on the day! No addiction here.

4 comments:

tif-do said...

What fun! That sounds like such a neat thing to do and best of it all some great family time.

leaner said...

there should be a 12 step program for you cachers!

It really is an addiction, and I feel the sting when I can't go with you.

TLC said...

Sounds so cool. A few years ago we came across a cache on our hike and we didn't touch it cause we didn't know what kind of "sicko" would leave things in the forest - had never heard of them at that time. We've come across another since and also a laminated business card. I think the boys would get a kick out of doing that. Slade loves solving problems and Jack would love to put his skills to the test too.

abeNanna said...

We will introduce everyone to this sport at the family reunion. Should be fun.