You Win This Time, Muggle!

After an evening catching up with a friend, it was easy enough to get a Mystery not far from our meeting spot. I first pulled up to a mural on the side of a surf shop featuring a fish with a highly improbable mutation, noted the nature of the mutation, and then used the corrected coordinates to arrive at a telephone pole behind a convenience store across the street from the mural. Easy and peasy enough, but I was not a happy camper. This was not my first choice of cache for the evening, and I was a little bit salty about it.

Many, many moons ago, I got an FTF on the way home, the second I had ever gotten. It was devoted to a fantastic beast, a rusted iron jackalope, perched outside of a building. Because of a competing nearby cache, that FTF was across the street from the jackalope, but in view. That cache had been there for years, so I never noticed that it, along with the competing one, had been archived, and that another one had been placed at the beast itself! Last night, I pulled into the parking lot and parked at the foot of it. I checked my phone to determine how close I was to the cache (forty-five feet), responded to a text message I had received during dinner, and was startled by a passing young woman wondering if I could give her a soda (I have had half a soda since January 4, 2014, so I certainly didn’t have one to give her). Once all that was resolved, I began to exit the car, when I noticed something about the tableau had changed. I believe it took me a moment to process the change because it had been so quick and unseen. In the minute and a half I triangulated, texted, and talked, a muggle had sat down at GZ! And I don’t mean “sat nearby and it would be awkward to approach.” I mean sat down on top of the cache! I double-checked a satellite view. Yep, those resting buttocks marked the spot! I watched him for a minute as I pondered what to do. I was set on this cache because it was both close to whence I had come and close to home. It was also appropriate because of my previous history with this spot. I decided to wait. I jumped back in the car and cranked the podcast I had been listening to back up (Robin Pierson’s The History of Byzantium, if you must know). I waited a bit. No change. I checked some emails and waited a bit longer. He shifted to the left, but otherwise made showed no attempt to move away. I drank some water and waited even longer. It seemed he might be there for the long haul, which was annoying. I didn’t have all night! Ultimately, my cognizance of the time trumped my desire for what I wanted. I adjusted to the recently appeared Mystery and did what needed to be done. My point here (and I do have one) is that for all the skills we nurture in the pursuit of caches, luck still holds sway over us. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough to place your hand in the first place you look and get your cache. Sometimes, you just cannot find that micro in a tree. Sometimes, you’re lucky enough for your muggles to be distracted. And sometimes you’re thwarted because they just will not move. This is the way of things.