Gut Punch!

A couple of days ago, a bunch of related caches (not a series) dropped, placed by our resident difficult hider and his acolytes, all of whom have been featured on these pages before.  As was to be expected, they were all high difficulty, several being high terrain.  Well, all but one.  A single cache out of sixteen was rated D1.5/T1.5.  That seemed perhaps doable despite my knowing that either of those 1.5 ratings could range up to 3.  When I got off work, I drove about twenty minutes to get to ground zero.  When I arrived, two non-standard things occurred: (1) I was a parking scofflaw, stopping in the bicycle lane of an artery road leading to the entrance of a suburb because nobody rides bikes in far suburbs like those (I apologize twice to the red-jerseyed bike rider who had to go around my car twice), and (2) there was someone at GZ who looked suspiciously like they were looking for something.  Another local cacher had seen what I had seen, and his work was a bit closer, so he beat me there.  Well, the more, the merrier, they say.  An extra set of eyes wouldn’t hurt, and I have no qualms about sharing an FTF.  He had about a five-minute head start on me, so he had looked in the obvious places.  I looked again because who among us can’t think of a time they looked in an obvious place and still managed to miss the cache?  And then we branched out a little more.  I was not as adventurous as I might have been because I’ve been trying to make a (possibly vain) attempt to preserve my clothes a little better than I have in the past (caching has taken a minor toll on my wardrobe), but we searched.  And searched.  And searched.  The light pole, the trees, the holes in the rocks, the whole area.  I paced around, pulling at branches, tree sap coating my hands, constantly babbling, going over ideas gleaned from the description and attributes.  But eventually, after twenty-five minutes, we decided to call off the search.  That seemed more than adequate for two people searching out a D1.5/T1.5.  We parted ways, still full of good spirits, if a bit disappointed.  I went off into that suburb for a quick find and then headed home for some dinner. 

The next day, I checked on that cache’s page again.  A couple of other cachers took a shot at it and logged DNFs for it.  That prompted the CO to correct the mistyped ratings from D1.5/T1.5 to D3.5/T4.5.  Are you BLANKing me?  Seriously?  I would not have even tried for that if I had known it was that hard!  Some days you get the bull, and some days you get the horns, but come on!