Kryptic’s Thoughts

Geocaching days are some of my favorite days. I am constantly amazed at all the places I get to visit pursuing this hobby of mine. It has been a great way to become familiar with a new city and its local hangouts.

Today I got to see a very “artistic” piece of art; spent time at the mall, but no money; played in a canoe; found the stairway to heaven/nowhere in a cemetery, found an unexpected little treasure and bushwhacked my way around a lake. All in all, a very enjoyable day!!

Rose and I managed to find eight geocaches today before we ran out of daylight. There were two that standout in memory. One involves my head in a canoe, the other stinging nettles and mosquitos. At the backpackers supply I looked right over the top of the cache and didn’t see it several times. On the second trip to the location Rose put her hand where I only put my eyes and came up with the cache. Yep I felt like a dumbass. Somedays are just like that. One of the next caches we did is called Genesis:Chapter 1. It’s a puzzle cache, meaning that the latitude and longitude coordinates are not directly given to you. Instead, there is some sort of puzzle for you to work out to obtain the coordinates. God knows I love puzzles and I’ve finally found a hobby that is often mentally more stimulating than it is physically challenging. Then again, sometimes caches are both.

Genesis was one of those puzzles that I couldn’t put down and couldn’t solve right away either. When I finally saw the answer staring back at me from the page, I literally slapped my forehead and said, “Duh! Shit! I’m a dumbass.” That was back in January. I put this cache down that day and didn’t think about it again until yesterday. The dumbass thing seems to have become the theme for the day, but I digress… So, anyway, we head out in the direction of the cache on this wide well maintained trail that goes around Waughop Lake. It’s 7:30 and still very light out, since the sun doesn’t go down here until about 9:30 p.m. in the summertime. The guidance arrow on the GPS unit turns and we are on another smaller but easily traversable trail. The arrow turns again and we are looking into what looks to be a deer trail going back into the brush. Ok what the hell, let’s do it. For 345 feet we scramble through tall grass, blackberry bushes, go over and under fallen trees and finally arrive at the cache site. Now, to find it. Finding a 4″ x 6″ camouflaged container in the half light caused by tree cover and dense undergrowth, is not as easy as you might think. You have to walk into stuff that s thigh high and feel around. I’m searching in one area and Rose another when I hear, “God damit!!” Expletive, expletive,expletive. I turn around and see Rose Jumping up and down with this look of extreme pain and I run over there. I look her over and I can’t see any blood, she is moving too much for anything to be twisted or broken, so I ask her what is wrong and she says, through gritted teeth the words: “Stinging Nettles.” I look at her blankly. She is still writhing in pain and all I can say is, “I don’t know what that means?!?!?” She laughs and grimaces at the same time and says, “I forgot how much this hurts!!” After a little awhile she shows me what stinging nettles look like, a good thing to know around here, and said,”I’m the dumbass that wore shorts caching in the woods!! I should know better!” Just about this time we hear the sound of two men talking and bicycles. We walk about 25 feet in the opposite direction from which we had come, and walk out onto a well used bike path about 10 feet wide. This is when I started to itch all along my left arm. I already felt like a huge dumbass for not looking closer at a map to find this trail, when I realized that it was dusk and the mosquitos were out and hungry and I was dinner. I also realized that I didn’t have any mosquito repellant. So we made it back to the Jeep and by the time we got home the welts had begun to rise on my arms and back and Rose’s ankles and calves were stinging like crazy. I hit the caladryl and she hit the showers and that is the end of our “dumbass caching” day
Perhaps we should have read “Geocaching for Dummies” a bit closer.