It was a lovely morning, so I headed out toward some caches within about an hour's drive south of here. There was a trio of them in the Caswell County, NC, gamelands, which I made my first target. Each of them required solving a little puzzle to obtain the final coordinates, none of which were complicated...
...Unless you transpose a couple of numbers in the solution. At one of them, I ended up trekking into terrain that I would rate T4 (T5 being the most difficult), which I didn't think was quite right. I finally checked the cache page to see what the true rating was (it turned out to be T1.5), so I knew I'd made an egregious boo-boo. I reworked the puzzle, and, lo, I was indeed several hundred feet off. So, with some difficulty, I made my way back to the proper location where, happily, I found the cache in a wink.
Next up, there was a hide located several hundred feet across the main roadway into what looked like not-terribly-dense woodland. So, rather than drive around the long way to the recommended starting point, I figured, well, why not bushwhack? I needed the exercise. About 300 feet in, after wading through endless barriers of briers and other painful pricklies, I determined that this was the worst idea ever devised by a human being. Thus, I went back and did things the regulation way. For this, at least, I was rewarded with a quick find.
Next up, some ways down the road, there was a cache called "Oh, To Be Young Again" (GCB9JMV), the description of which suggested that I might have to climb a tree. And this made me happy because I love climbing trees. Once I reached the location, I found the proper tree quickly, and found myself facing a conundrum. The lowest branch was just above my head, and its diameter was too large to get a firm enough grip to pull myself up. However...
Behind the nearby park building, I found some empty five-gallon paint buckets, so I grabbed a couple and stacked them so that I could get that extra step needed to boost myself upward. And shortly, I had the cache in hand.
Now, getting back down was a little trickier, but I didn't break or bend anything I shouldn't have. So...yay.
After these, the subsequent caches were generally easy and, of course, very
satisfying. But, perhaps needless to say, it's the challenging hides that are,
in the end, most memorable and the most fun.
On an altogether
different subject, today marks one year since Frazier left us. I'd had him for
18 years, and I felt a pretty strong rush of grief today. But our house is
still full of cats, and they are as loved as probably any cats on the face of
the earth—even if they feel they are perpetual victims of the Great
Starvation.
|
| Old dude on the hunt |
