GeoCache: I'm NOT Obsessed... Right? HeadHardHat's Geocaching Insights

HeadHardHat's Award Winning Geocaching Blog is a geocache treasure trove of geocaching information. Years of searchable geocaching insights await you here. HeadHardHat's GeoSnippits Geocaching Videos series can be seen on You Tube. You can also find him on his new GeoSnippits Reboot Podcast series and the Geocaching Podcast. Geocaching the outdoor treasure-hunting game which the participants use a GPS receiver to hide and seek containers called "geocaches" or "caches" anywhere in the world

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Stuck Between A Rock and a Soft Place

It's always the easy ones that drive me nutz. Here I am at a 2/2 geocache park and grab just a cuss'n and a swear'n. It started easy enough. A new geocache popped up on my radar just a few miles from where I work. Somebody had already picked up the FTF over the weekend so I wasn't in a major rush this time. This would be a terrific lunch break grab or so I thought.

The drive to the cache site area was quick and as I stepped out of the car the cooler air let me know that a cold front was making it's way into the Piedmont. Not a problem, though I almost had to zipper my coat, almost. Firing up my phone I went into Geocaching Navigator and started towards ground zero. I was at a treeline with the median of the road next to it. The cache appeared to be slightly to the left which meant walking into the woods instead of the nice cut grass. No problem it was only sprinkled with waist high briers. How bad could it be? By sixty feet in and within 10 feet of the cache my legs felt like I was the loser of a fourway bobcat fight. Either way I was near ground zero and THAT was when I did my fatal mistake. I saw a logical spot for the cache instead of verifying the coords on the GPS. Needless to say I spent the next 15 minutes swallowed by a huge holly tree (more tree than bush) getting scratched and torn up all over the place. Did I mention I was looking for a bison tube? Oh the fun of it all.

When I reached the 15 minute mark which meant I was no longer having any "fun". I decided to come in from another angle. This time I was out of the woods and onto the grass. Sure enough the GPS pointed this time more towards a huge boulder. Naw, couldn't be. I walk closer towards it with that sinking feeling that the brier patch drag through may not have been necessary. Sure enough... @!$%^!@^!@!!! Right smack in the upper middle of the boulder was a stone painted bison tube wedged in a hole. The whole thing should have taken a couple of minutes and have been a lot less painful. What can I say all part of the adventure of geocaching...