Geocaching 2014 - Two Days in a Row

I'm very proud of getting out two days in a row.  Felt nice to be out in nature wandering around.  At least for the six days until it snows.

This one was over in Lebanon Hills Park.  I almost gave up on it because of the mosquitoes until I walked past this log on the way out.  It wasn't upright like that when I walked past it.  I had to turn it over.


You can see the hidey hole better in this picture.


I also found this one with a poo sculpture.  Classy!  I don't know that I've ever thought, "This would be better with a poo sculpture on it."  A lady walked past while I was signing the log and moving goodies back and forth.  I said "hi" but she glared at me and kept walking without a word.  I suspect she thought I was a friendly rapist.


I grabbed the travel bug out of the poo cache. He teaches love at the end of a gun and has a goal to travel the world with that message.  Carry on Sheriff Lifemessage.

Geocaching 2014 - Trying to Reboot

It has been a long time since I've gone geocaching.  I've hit a cache or two over the last two years, but the accident pretty much put a stop to caching.  Not because I can't do it, but it was what I was doing the day of the accident and during the days leading up to it, and it's sort of like a big foot came down on the whole thing.  Doesn't seem to be PTSD, it's just that my geocaching sprint was interrupted and I never got back to it.  It didn't have the same effect on bicycling. In some respects, picking up trash for Litterati, over 5000 pieces this year, is similar enough that it scratched the geocaching itch.  At least until I realized my neighborhood is absolutely no cleaner at the end of summer than it was when I started, and I'm depressed.  Geocaching is a happier hobby than collecting garbage.  So today, after talking to Boss during the week, I got back out and found a few that were close to home.

This one was in the woods behind Target.  A nice easy find.  But I left my bike about 400 feet from the cache without locking it, so I was paranoid the whole time.


I took the blue dinosaur and left the little squishy girl in her bubble.  I did not take the creepy head.  It's a kids' cache.  I worry about the kid who wants that head.


This one was near the park and ride.  Not too far from where I found a porn DVD and underpants and drug paraphernalia (two different locations, same park and ride).  See...much more rewarding.  There's no porn in the cache.  Instead I swapped some little white crystals that will work with our Compounded board game for the rubber duck on the lid.


Off the Highline bicycling trail.  I searched for this one a year ago or so without any luck and it took quite a while to find it as it wasn't spot on the coordinates.  It's up there on that stick.  The only cache I couldn't find today was winter findable and I'm pretty sure it's on a stick too, but I couldn't find an obvious candidate.  I've searched for that one before as well with DNF (do not find), over behind the Regal Theater where I pick up so much Taco Bell trash.  I'll be trying again, although I might wait for winter so there are fewer leaves in the way.


Here's the stick cache up close.  That gingerbread dude I'm putting in there isn't edible.


Boss asked me if I thought fewer people were caching.  Based on the maintenance of some of the caches and how few names there were from this summer, I'd say anecdotal evidence points to yes.  But I'm also going after some pretty old caches, not newer ones.  But to flip it, when I was at Code Camp on Saturday at the U of MN looking for a cache where too many muggles lurked, there were two other cachers trying to appear innocuous while searching around a giant metal man in a courtyard.  Then again, they were coding geeks, so perhaps not a representative sample.  I don't think they had any better luck than I did.  There were just too many people touring campus to get quiet searching time, and I bailed for coffee after 20 minutes of waiting.

Here's a rather wet cache.  It had a little rubber stopper in the bottom to keep the logs out of the water, but it wasn't working so someone had jammed it upside down into a rotten log to make sure it drained.  And the log is almost full to boot.  I left a zombie.  One of three that I believe Eryn used for an "about me" collage she did when she was a kindergartner.



I always forget how much I get to see while I'm caching.  This swamp looks ugly from the road.  But down in the reeds and cattails, it's pretty quiet for being so close to the interstate.  I also forgot how scratched up my legs get.  Later I rode my indoor bicycle trainer for 30 minutes and the sweat made my legs feel like they were covered in fiberglass insulation.


This is from the one I couldn't find.  I was sure I'd find it in this chunk of concrete, but no luck.  I reviewed the logs to see what I was missing, but they were no help other than to tell me to approach from the right direction.  As near as I can figure, none of the directions of the compass is the "right" direction.


Eryn went with me to find the fifth cache off the day over by Juniors in Eagan.  We were eating dinner at Ghengis Grill with my folks and my wife and mom waited for us while we walked a quarter mile to a pine tree between Walmart and Juniors.  It wasn't a bad pine tree hide as far as pine tree hides go.  A bit of camo, but it was generally open under the tree and the placement wasn't designed to drive us nuts.


This is not from today but from earlier in the week. I spend a lot of time in our in-house coffee shop and cafe because I can get a good cup of coffee over there at Caribou and because my team sits over a tenth of a mile (and two floors) from my office, so this is a good place 2/3 of the way toward them to work remote so I can get to meetings or have them come to me.  On Thursday and Friday this little container was sitting by the plant and it was so much like a cache it amused me.  I was tempted to open it up and put a list of names and dates in it in case the owner came back.

Purdy

Some flowers I took a picture of while geocaching in Thresher Park in Eagan. The cache isn't in there. It's somewhere nearby.  I was concerned I'd end up grabbing a bee before I grabbed a cache.

Caching Reboot

I went out tonight to do some geoaching, bicycling to the closest three to my house.  Apparently I'm out of practice, because I had two Did Not Finds out of three attempts.  And I haven't been out in so long that I forgot that pants are mandatory in the summer.  And sort of mandatory in the winter in Minnesota, come to think of it.  This is one scratch out of several I did find along with a nice multi-spotted shin/ankle bruise that looks like it went as deep as the bone.  Obviously, I don't cache half-assed.  I won't give up.  I'd like to hit all the new ones by the house.  But I'll be throwing on my old fat guy Dockers to trudge through the scrub, regardless of how stupid I look on my bike.



I did get a nice photograph of some near-cache flowers for my troubles.  Much better than the flattened prayer penny that was available.

Pumpkin Cache

While I was at PMP training this week in Edina, I took the opportunity after eating lunch to go looking for a cache.  There were a couple within vague walking distance of Benchmark Learning - e.g. less than half a mile away and possible to reach and return before training restarted.  While it's not very impressive as caches go, just a small container in a pine tree, I though the surroundings were pretty cool...

You can see the cache tree from here.  This is a city park and someone planted a whole pumpkin patch at the end of the park near a large stand of trees.  It's obviously getting close to fall given the size of some of the pumpkins in the patch.  I think the cache should have been in the patch, maybe in a fake pumpkin, although that would have meant re-hiding the cache at some point.  Still, pretty cool to have a pumpkin patch so close to a cache - not something I've encountered before.

Some recent geocaching...

I recently downloaded the geocaching.com app to my iPhone.  This gives me the ability to geocache about whenever I want, as long as my battery doesn't die.  Most important realization about caching?  Cliffs and scary terrain don't scare me at all.  Teenagers wandering around in the woods as a pack result in me vacating almost immediately.  Not because I feel like some forest-dwelling perv, although that occurred to me.  But because I don't trust why they're out there, so I don't see the need to be anywhere in their vicinity.

Mr. Geocaching Cowboy is from a trail near my house that I didn't even know existed.  There are a number of lakes in the neighborhood you can't see, and the trail wraps around them.  Some serious work on the bike.

I gave Colin a whole bag full of geocaching dinosaurs and animals tonight.  And at least one soldier.  But I think I still have the cowboy.


I think you can see the cache in this picture if you think about it.  But only because the hiding place broke and it's a little more obvious.  Still took me a few minutes to figure out what I was looking for.


This is a camo style in Call of Duty.  It was very hard to see in the tree.


There was a cache across the street, although I think it had been muggled.  There were so many cars and pedestrians going by that I just couldn't spend much time really looking around.  But this hardware store was pretty cool.  If I had a business (one with a building, that is...well, a building that's not rental property...I mean, not rental property for half a dozen people...who were in a family...you know what the hell I mean), I'd like it to be big enough that it has it's own sculpture park.


Near the high bridge.  Uppertown.  I didn't sit in the chair.  It was REALLY cold despite our recent weather.  It just happened to be between breakfast with Erik at the Day to Day and home.


Klund has the Pearly Gates.  Uppertown has this.  I'm not sure who wins.  Both have a cache nearby.


Cool sculpture in the Uppertown park.  Looks sort of dragonish.


The cache in the Uppertown park. My fingers were numb after getting it open.

Kinnickinnic Caching III

This is Boss' leg after geocaching in Kinnickinnic State Park in Wisconsin.  It was unmarred before he started.  And if you think this is bad, you should see what one of those nasty brambles did to his face.  Geocaching is not for the faint of heart.  It's a violent, brutal, sport.

 

I can't believe how unscary this picture looks.  I was very paranoid about stepping out on this tree.  It's about 3x longer than it looks.  It's about 5x higher off the ground.  And it's about 20x less stable.  I'm not making that up.  I'm not generally nervous about stepping out on edges and structurally unsound things, but I was nervous about this tree.


Left.  Box.  Right.  Box.  Boxes everywhere.  You want some box?  Go anywhere but straight ahead and you'll get yourself some box.  Me?  I like box.  This sign made me very happy.  There's a map in case you get lost on the way to the box.


SMAH!!!!  Or SAHM!!!!  Something like that.  This is a letterbox.  The idiot's geocache.  Who has time to carry a stamp with them?  Oh...that's right.  BOBCAM does.  We saw his stamped signature all over the place.  I have no doubts that if you want to pull down caching numbers in the tens of thousands, you have to find ways to streamline.  This is one of the nicer letterboxes I've seen as it really did double duty as a cache. Only three stamps in the log book, however.  Sort of sad given the love and attention lavished on the box.


I WILL HUMP THE S*** OUT OF YOU GEOCACHE!!!  We've all seen those humping tortoise videos.  Don't pretend you haven't.  This is one very confused tortoise.  It's probably the camo.


Oven top.  We took the roundabout route to this one.  Sort of walked in a spiral that narrowed in on it only to realize it was only about 100' off the main path on a tributary path.  Strange object to find in the woods.


Boss, being all serious about his geocaching.  Or offering me something from his bag of crack.  Hard to say. But the context implies geocaching.


Tigger!  Fortunately, there was no Pooh in the cache.


This was a fun one.  The cache is in the handle of the shovel - it had a name like "I dig this park".


Moe the Sleaze was here!  I showed this picture to Eryn and then had to explain what a sleaze was.  Chaymus (from work) asked me how I explained "sleaze".  I tried to tell her it was sort of the boy who paid you too much attention, but if you were older than 8.  And who told jokes you shouldn't be listening to.  I admit, it was a rather loose definition that wasn't "some guy who caches".


There's a cache in that tree.  Part of our day took us completely around this prairie grass area.  Quite the hike.


That is a plunger.  Did you know that a plunger fits perfectly over a peanut butter jar?  It's like how your hand, at the middle finger, is exactly the size of your mini me.  Or your reach is your height.  Or your foot length corresponds to your IQ.  Or the cc's in your mouth are exactly the cc's of your balls.  It's true...  Don't believe me?  Try it.


F-in bird caches.  They always scare me.  You're looking and looking and then there's a bird next to your head and you're worried you've caught some bird-borne virus.


Guess!!!  It's a cache .........  cache ......  cow!  Looks like an ornament.  Boss and I discussed that we should put out a temporary cache at Christmas that has about a thousand ornaments, each with "look at the blank ornament"  inside a container.  If you're really lucky, you manage to start a few reads from the end.  If you're unlucky, you start about 200 reads from the end.  Brutal.  A multi-cache on a single tree.


I don't know why.  It's a screw for a boat.  It's in the woods.  There's no water.  There are no boats.  But there weren't any cows or toilets either.  Wait...scratch that.  There were toilets.


See.  I s*** a cache.  Don't I look blissfully happy turtling something larger than my head into a bed pan?  Since the surgery, I have the balloon knot of a superhero. I could pass a dozen caches and still be relaxed and ready to hike the next tenth of a mile.

Excellent day of caching.  It's good to set a personal record.

Kinnickinnic Caching II

As I mentioned earlier, Friday was a big geocaching day.  Boss and I found 36 caches.  At least I found 36.  He found 37 with the one I pointed him to in Prescott.  We did our caching at Kinnickinnic State Park in Wisconsin, which may be the very first time I've ever paid to cache.  And out of state visitor fees at that.  It cost us approximately $0.33/cache, or half that if you count each cache twice because there were two of us.   We noticed Bobcam hadn't been there until recently, which seemed strange, but it was my hypothesis that he's a nonresident as well.  If you do like 30,000 caches at .33 each, that's $10,000!  That's a semi-expensive hobby.

 

Despite it being mid-March, the park was beautiful.  Very nice for hiking.  I only found one wood tick.  Yep.  Wood tick. You heard me right.  Little Scony bloodsucker.  Isn't it disturbing that such an idyllic setting has a dark side?


Our first cache was a multicache with a phone.  This was next.  Bear with a butt plug.  I kept the highlander keychain.  That's the coolest swag I've found in quite a while.  I left behind oodles of beads.  Not the usual plastic zombies I leave behind, but I have this giant box of caching stuff to unload for which I've swapped zombies in the past, so it's time to put it all back out in the woods.  If you see topless women running around Kinnickinnic, you can thank me.


We did two mystery caches.  Usually those are evil and difficult and may even require access to the internet if you have to figure out the years of the movies of all the Bond girls.  But I researched these before we went, and they involved reading a plaque.  Boss was quick to point out that Clyde L. Butch Wolf was only 54 when he died, which meant we had a mere decade left.  I think he was killed by a tick.


The other mystery cache plaque.  It seemed brand new, and yet someone had already tried to carve a heart in it.


F the law!  I do what I want!  You don't own me!  And we got away with it too.


Yum!


Near the park plaque.  The view for which the park is famous.  In Wisconsin circles at least.  Almost looks like something you'd see in Oregon.


Monkey paw!  Make a wish!  I wish I find the next cache and that it's not down a steep, muddy, hill, into a scary ravine, and then up an enormous, muddy hill infested with nasty brambles, only to find a trail right next to it when I get there.  Stupid monkey paw.  Didn't work for s***.


Near the overlook.  We got off trail after this one as well.  General rule of thumb, if you're climbing extremely large hills, you're probably doing something wrong.


Except this hill.  This is the "easy" hill after taking the difficult way to find the cache at the bottom. I'm not sure if you can appreciate it from the photo, but we had to take two microbreaks on the way up.  I blame the elevation and thin air.


Down at the bottom is the St. Croix river.  It has an inlet for swimming which doesn't get much water flow, so it was still frozen.  Enough for these geese, but not for us.  Looks a bit like a glacier.  I'm not sure what the geese were up to - mostly just staying away from us.


To be continued...me on a toilet, any way to the box, and Moe the Sleeze.