The Gift That Keeps On Giving

A couple of days ago, I wasn’t feeling too hot. I almost didn’t get a cache. I just didn’t have it in me to figure out where to go or the wherewithal to hunt. We all have those days, and I have them as much as the next guy (well, maybe less, since (assuming I find a cache today) it’ll be Day 2,300 in a row). But then I remembered my fallback option: in February, I was given a GPX file with a bunch of puzzle solutions by some cachers visiting from New Hampshire. Since then, I have picked one to grab every so often when I need an easy day. Well, Monday qualified. All it took was a drive to a furniture warehouse, the realization that I came in the wrong entrance for the cache I had chosen, and then a redeployment to another lamppost in the parking lot to do what I needed to do for the day. The drive was the hardest part. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Why was I feeling not so hot in the first place? Part of it was life, the universe, and everything. Once again, we all have those days. Part of it was that I was a little worn out from the day before. You see, on Sunday, after having driven 700 miles the day before, I went out caching with friend of the site Razorbackgirl. She was working on a challenge and needed to get a bunch of caches before the month ended, so she asked if I would like to come along. Of course I would! Contrary to all my talk about being a lone-wolf cacher (and I am), having company makes finding numbers both fun and possible; alone, I’d get bored after a half dozen or so! We started on a cursed series of caches: the road they were placed along was far less busy when the caches were put there in 2010. We diverted to another series, but we were disheartened to learn that recently, some more experienced cachers could find only about half of them. We ended up going to a third series, placed almost a decade ago, with each cache named for various area cachers of that time, some of whom I knew well, others I had never heard of.

We found a lot of them, though the world had stretched out to them since their placement, too. All in all, we walked away with two dozen by lunchtime (before it got hot). Good times.

As a final thought (because I can’t help self-referencing): A year ago today, I was at the oldest cache in Maine with Razorbackgirl and the rest of the Texas Six. That was cool, too.