We Did It! 500 Caches In One Year!

We had to do a little power caching to get to 500 geocaches found, (ten on Friday, nine on Saturday, six on Sunday) but we made it.

During our quest for 500 finds, we saw a bunch of neat things. It's a good thing we always keep a camera handy. This is the first time I have ever seen a bald eagle in the wild... And here in Florida to boot!

He was perched on this power line tower and was watching for anything that moved.

We also came across this mini-chicken cache. Alright, so it isn't real, but since the cache is called "Where's The Chicken" in front of a Chik-Fil-A, it was a great cache to find.

Ok, back to the real birds.. As we were walking through this ex-power station turned nature preserve, we also spotted this falcon. He's a big boy. We spotted quite a few raptors out here.

And now, the hunt for 500. This was one of 10 we found during an evening hunt, something we call 'Vampire Caching'. This one is located at the edge of a golf driving range.

As we were night caching, we also came across one of our geocoins in a cache. Of course, we picked it up, and dropped another one of ours in the container.

This one had something to do with monkeys and it was tethered to a fence. When I tried to carry the container out to the clearing (in the dark), suddenly I said; "Hey!" because I was yanked to a stop by the tether.

This is what a geotag looks like. It has the coordinates for the next stage of a multiple geocache. Of course, I had to wipe off some of the coordinates, just in case a fellow geocacher is looking at this site. We had to find this thing, so other geocachers need to look for it too.

This park was very nice. It was well-groomed and very clean. It was nice that whenever you might be getting tired (or want to sign a geocach logbook), you always find a seat nearby.

And they even have water stations placed around the park for joggers, runners and their dogs (see the silver bowl on the ground?) so they won't get overheated. These things are stocked with ice and water, and they are rotated to keep them fresh too. And of course, there's another park bench nearby where we can Sit-N-Sign the log for the cache I found on this water station. It was fun picking up the 8 caches in this park on Saturday.

The next day, we went to this water-front preserve/park that was once an electric generating plant. This is where we got quite a bunch of nice wildlife pictures.

Our 500th cache was one called, "Russian Roulette". It's a cache that had 6 containers hidden in the bushes around a clearing (the coordinates only take you to the center of the clearing) and you have to find the one cache of the six that has the logbook in it. Katrina found the first one and it had a toothbrush in it. Nope, that's not the right one!

I found the second one and it had Q-Tips in it. Nah, that's not it either. I have this look on my face because I think I spotted another container as Luann was taking this picture.

Luann went to investigate, and sure enough, this one was number 3. It had a big cork in it. 'Click'! Nothing in the chamber on this one...

I located this cache about the same time as Katrina located the one with the logbook in it. Of course, since mine didn't have a logbook, it had something else in it and it turned out to be one of those spring-loaded snakes that jumps out of the can when you open it. Yah!

And the winner is? Katrina! This was a neat design for a cache, and a good one to celebrate our 500th find.

Well, since there was one more left in the preserve, we just had to find it on our way out... Thumbs up for another find!

At another cache we had looked for on Saturday, it was located at a natural spring with these mini-falls. There were too many people around for us to put in an effort to find the cache, but the pictures were worth the visit.