A couple of days ago, I went to find a cache like I always do. I pulled up a Traditional on a map and drove to it. When I arrived, it was a dead end or YARN (Yet Another Road to Nowhere) that I recognized. There was a cache there I had never managed to find. I checked the cache page. It wasn’t the old one. It was a new cache, only a few months old. I gave it a look, minorly emboldened by a hint in the title. I didn’t find it. History sometimes repeats itself.
I went to a second Traditional. As I pulled up to it, I recognized the location again: a giant stone entrance sign to a subdivision with a cache I had never managed to find. Once again, I checked the cache page to see that, once again, it had been replaced. And once again, I came up short.
I let it go and tried a third Traditional at a side entrance to the same subdivision. I passed by it because I knew where to park. And how did I know? Because there had been a cache there that I had never found, and I am sometimes a glutton for punishment.
I walked up to the bench where the old cache was supposed to have been, but after rechecking the map, I saw that this new one was in a nearby tree instead. And after finding the appropriate crack, I was rewarded with a fake roach and a log.
On days like this, I wonder if it’s always worth it. There is no failure worse than a recurring failure. It feels like you’re just butting your head against a wall. And then I remember one of my earliest caches. It was a flat magnet under electrical metering equipment on the back of a strip mall. I went to it multiple times and couldn’t find it. Once, I asked a fellow cacher who was less experienced than me to come with me to have another set of eyes, and we didn’t find it. I met the CO at an Event, and he confirmed that it was exactly what I thought it was. I went back and still didn’t find it. On my seventh attempt, with the help of the aforementioned fellow cacher, we finally found it. It was exactly what we thought, only on a neighboring set of electrical meters. Persistence pays off, I guess. That said, six years ago, when I was new to all this, I was more than happy to be persistent. Now? I’d probably let it go until I got back to it again—if I got back to it again.
Yesterday, I drove up to Taylor to do some location scouting with one of the many volunteers who are helping to get this whole shebang off the ground. It takes quite a bit of planning to get a five-day extravaganza planned, so even though it’s eleven months out, we’re taking every advantage of the opportunity to get things done early. We started with a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce to get some good ideas for Event locations and ways that we might use a CITO to leave the community a better place. We scoped out some locations to feel how they might be received by the many cachers we expect. We talked to some local business owners to get the inside skinny on some of the true inner workings of Taylor Babylon. Pie was involved. I imagine this is a lot easier with a Mega in a static location. Over time, you build relationships with the town and the residents. Having a moving Mega means building all that from scratch pretty much every year. It takes more legwork than you might imagine. There are already a good handful of moving parts and it’s still eleven months out. But we’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again!
Geocaching While Black 