We Went Geocaching - But This Time, With Karen!

Karen joined us for some geocaching fun Saturday morning at a park located between us. She brought Kylor along and we had a grand old time!

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Ahhhh, Saturday morning, and the geocachers congregate in order to partake of a breakfast spread, a couple of gallons of coffee and to hunt for the many geocaches hidden in Lake Park.

It's 8:00 and everybody is 'bright-eyed & bushy-tailed'. Yeah, right! You can see us off to the left talking to one of the cachers about some of the neat hides in the area. That's one of the things we like to do at these meetings is to talk about the great ones we have found, and 'the ones that got away'...

Karen & Kylor showed up soon after the opening events and she got herself a cup of eye-opener. This is really all you have to wear to go geocache hunting, and the long pants and sneakers are highly recommended (you can see people wearing shorts in the pictures above, but when you're searching around saw palmetto, cat's briar and blackberry, you will definitely spring a 'hydaulic leak' with that stuff on). The walking stick might come in handy if you need to poke at something in the underbrush, happen to stumble and twist an ankle on the trail, or want to do a Charlie Chaplin 2-step on a floating dock.

It looks like Katrina isn't much of a morning person, look at those eyes... But here she is, ready for the hunt. Actually, she isn't feeling too well, so she has a doctor's appointment later.

Here we are, positioned at the closest cache by the geo-meeting location, where Karen and I go over a map of the caches in the park that I printed up. Florida Sandpiper (Earl) stopped by to say 'Hi', because we have gone hunting together a couple of times, since he lives close to us. This guy is 73 years old, has retinal detatchment problems with his eyes, and yet he goes all over the area, finding caches as well as the best of them.

One of the things you can do with geocaching, is watch for the posting of a new geocache and run out real quick in order to be the first one to find it. This is called an FTF (First To Find) and many times, we have come across 'Florida Sandpiper' or 'Lost Alot @ 70' either having already found the new cache, or sweeping the area trying to find it first, by the time we arrive on the scene.

Speaking of FTF, this is the very first geocache Karen went looking for. It seems there was another cacher looking for this one when we arrived on the scene (she had been there looking for it for 15 minutes prior to our arrival) and as we began searching, more cachers showed up. Karen turned out to be the smart one though, because she stood back and asked me to read the description and the hint of this cache to her so she could get an idea of what it was, and perhaps where, to look for it.

When I read off the hint for "Harry Potter - Hedwig's Roost" (the clue is in the name) she knew that Hedwig, Harry Potter's white owl in the movie, must like to roost up in the trees. When she looked up, there it was, a white plastic owl with a container mounted in the bottom of it hanging in a pine tree. I saw it was suspended by a string, so I followed the string's path to a couple of trees nearby and unspooled the line in order to lower the owl into her hands.

When she opened the container and handed me the logbook, I was surprised to see nobody else had signed it yet.Yep, Karen found one of those elusive FTF caches and it was the first cache she looked for and found. It is such a competitive thing, that many cachers won't get an FTF until about 6 moths to a year of searching for geocaches, and here she did it on her first find (dat's my Cuz what done dat!). After the ceremonial signing, I told the crowd around her that this was the first cache she went looking for and she just got the FTF! The started clapping and making a general ruckus. One guy even asked if he could take her picture with the cache container. It turns out, he was the one that hid it and wanted a picture of the FTF'er when it was found (another rarity).

I explained to Karen later why this was such a big deal to geocachers, and then it made sense why she was treated as something of a celebrity and somebody would point her out and say; "there's the first-timer who made an FTF on her first find!"

By the way, what's with the 2 and 3 fingers? Has the old 'thumbs up' dealy gone out of style after so many years?

After getting surrounded by so many searchers in the geocaching 'herd' on that last one, I told Karen we needed to break off from them and search for caches on our own so I could show her some of the techniques of hunting for geocaches and the styles of the hides. This one here is an ammo box that once held 7.62mm rounds in it. I believe Kylor is enjoying himself, what do you think?

This cache is a water tight aluminum cylinder that was used for holding welding rods to keep them dry. It also had a travel bug in it, which was a white Matchbox rescue truck with a dogtag chain on it. Since Karen is still new to the hobby, we decided to leave it in the container for the next searcher to move along to another cache. For a minute there, I thought Kylor was going to get his hand stuck in the container. There were a bunch of neat things in there, and kept digging stuff out of the container.

This cache is the one that was close to the geo-meeting area. We came back after the thundering geo-herd had passed by. Since somebody was sitting in a car parked right beside the geocaching zone (GZ) I first gave a little instruction about how to avoid piquing the curiousity of people who aren't geocachers. We tend to call non-geocachers 'Muggles', just like the non-magical people in the Harry Potter stories. The idea is that if somebody whom is not part of the game watches what your doing and then investigates the GZ after you leave, they could raid or take the geocache and that would take it out of commission, which is what geocacher's strive to avoid. So yes, there is even something of a 'Spy vs. Spy' element to this too, especially the geocaches located in the non-wooded areas, like the grocery store parking lot. I have to admit though, they did a real good job, so the geo-muggle paid no attention to our activities.

This is what I meant when I said earlier that the cane can also be used to perform a Charlie Chaplin 2-step on a dock. This is my most favorite picture of the day's events, because it tells a story all by itself. Karen was trying to make some serious waves on the water by rocking back and forth, and Kylor just stood there at the edge, watching Mom acting silly. Apparently, he has a thing about floating docks, so the best he could muster was standing where he was. At least he was willing to step up on it and watch her from there. This photo-memory is definitely a 'keeper'.

After doing some geo-hunting and having great success at it, we stopped by the geo-pavilion (yeah, I know, everything is geo-this & geo-that...) in order to rest a bit and get something to eat. If you were wondering why Katrina and Luann weren't in the past couple of pictures, that's because they had to go to a doctor's appointment this morning, so they took off, saw the doc and came back. Come to find out, Katrina has strep throat, so keeping her out of the food service booth at the Renaissance Faire this weekend was a good choice.

Since the whole troupe was back together, we sauntered off down the trail to find a couple more caches. As we were walking over this bridge, Karen was telling Luann about how she got a kick out of seeing a posting in our weblog of Luann leaning on the very post that had a geocache concealed in it.
Click Here To See 'Lean On Me'

In this shot, Karen is graphically showing Luann what she meant.

Well, it looks like we found another cache, and look at Kylor go! We're so happy he was having a good time. This container was a big plastic jug with camoflauge duct-tape all over it. When we had passed by this site earlier, there was an arrow dug into the dirt and was pointing directly at the cache site, most likely by somebody in the geo-herd (I know, I know...). Kylor decided to change the arrow and have it point away from the container. That'll show them!

This next cache took us quite a bit off-trail, but that is part of the fun. You can barely see Kylor's red shirt, he's trying to be the one to find it before the rest of us can get to the GZ.

Well, this is the last picture of the day before we had to head out of the park after the geo-festival. Well, that's strange... Will you look at that? I think Karen may have overworked herself this morning... Or, something...

Now, these pictures are from a day later (today), because we decided to pick up where we left off yesterday. That's why the color change in the girl's shirts. We felt we had to pick up a few of the new ones we didn't get because our schedules had us leaving early...

Hey, Mr. Gopher Tortoise! This is one of the reasons we like to go geocaching. We always seem to be coming across critters like this in the wild.

Looks like Katrina found another one. Well, maybe not...

And here is a red-faced, 6-striped skink, one of the few lizard species that are native to Florida. This little guy sat perfectly still, letting me get a nice close-up of him. What a poser...

This was tough cache to find. It's a plastic rock that was caught in a scheduled burn in the park. It really looks like one of Nature's own, doesn't it? Katrina found this one after we had been searching for about 10 minutes.

Ah, scoot the pine needles over and look what was under it! Peekaboo, we found you! This is considered to be a coffe cache, so named because a coffee container was used for the cache.

Ah, the last one of the weekend. This is a 35mm film canister tucked into a palm/palmetto bush. This concealment method is typically referred to as a 'Florida Hide'.

Well, we found a bunch of geocaches this weekend, we're tired and thirsty, so I think it's time to head home now. C-U!