If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Yesterday I needed a quick one. I had stuff to do and couldn’t spend a lot of time going to the hinterlands for a cache or heading to the other side of town for one of the newer ones that have recently dropped. However, I had some old business that worked out nicely. Many years ago, I took a shot at a cache not very far from my job. I didn’t find it, which was to be expected; I didn’t know what I was doing when I was younger (no doubt older me will say the same thing about current me). I’ve also been lazy and haven’t been back to take another shot at it for years. A couple of days ago, I was looking at the map for my daily cache and decided to take a look at it since it had been a while. As fate would have it, someone had found it that day for the first time in six months. They mentioned that the log was drenched, basically mush, and I felt that sounded like a good excuse to make a quick little maintenance mission. So yesterday, I parked at an apartment complex near GZ and went for a walk. Once I made it there, I realized that there was a decent path that led there that I had somehow completely missed. Isn’t that always the way? Hard way in, easy way out. I began looking around in the branches, on the telephone poles, all around back-and-forth. The only thing I knew about it was that, as the hint said, it was close to the path. I found the remains of a small homeless encampment. I remembered that a previous log had mentioned that someone might be living nearby and that they opted not to go for it for that reason, but that was six months before. Perseverance paid off. Nestled between a couple of roots at the foot of a tree was my quarry, a camo tape wrapped bottle. Inveni, inscripsi (on a fresh log provided by yours truly), reposui.

That was all. Nothing special. It was just nice to get an old pin off my map. There are a few things more annoying than seeing a large open area with one cache sitting there that you can’t find or is too difficult to go after at the time. Of course, in this case, I’m only talking about a Traditional. I can’t even begin to mention how many Mysteries are on my map that are seemingly unsolvable puzzles. Among my non-cashing friends, I am the puzzle master, the person to come to when you’ve got to solve something and you just can’t do it. Ever since I started caching, though, I have learned the limits of that. If I had a dollar for every unsolved puzzle cache, I would have at least seventeen dollars. But that is probably a discussion for another time. Having succeeded in my task, I headed back to my car. I had stuff to do, but at least there was one less thing on the list.