As you can see to the right, we visited the plaque commemorating the Original Stash...the very first cache ever placed in America, as I understand it. While chatting with BIL Christopher, I found that he and his brother were childhood friends of the guy that started it all. How cool is that??
I owe Christopher many thanks for considerable improvements to my "geo-senses", as he joined/guided us on our first assault on local caches.
I am quite impressed with the creativity of some cachers. My favorite, I believe, is one that leads the hunter to a bench, with the insistence that "we must bring at least 1/2 gallon of water." We followed our trusty GPS (incredibly cool toy) to the location (carrying a gallon of water...who knows?) and sniffed around until we found a tube, maybe 4 feet long and 2 inches in diameter. We screwed the cap off of the tube and poured water into it until a cache container floated to the top. VERY exciting (OK, maybe I'm easily excited...it's the child in me). Another cool feature is that the tube immediately starts draining into a catch basin, so you had better pour water enough and fast enough to get a grip on the container before it descends back to the bottom of the tube. Koen and I went away laughing and fist-bumping at our most well thought out discovery. Hopefully, this description won't ruin anyone's caching experience. As far as I know, Christopher is the only cacher among followers of this blog, so, Christopher, forget that part of the blog. ;-)
Koen, our ten-year-old son has caught the bug worse than I have! He can't seem to contain himself when he sees a potential hiding spot in the direction we are walking. He HAS to run ahead and check it out.
On my first local trip with Christopher and the twins, I logged 16 caches. The next day, we went out again and Koen REALLY wanted to set up an account of his own. We set up his account on the road, with the use of my Droid X (another very cool toy), as we were driving to the location of the Original Stash. When we got home, he wanted to log all of the caches we had found the previous day, but it occurred to me that, since he hadn't signed the logs, people might delete his records from their caches. SO, guess what we did on Saturday...he and I rode around on our bikes and knocked out eight of the caches in our area that I had already logged. We rode 7.3 miles in 95+ temps and arrived home with his face beet red. I had him splashing cold water on his face and head, but Mara insisted that he jump in the shower to lower his body temperature. He didn't get one of those heat-related headaches, so we obviously caught it in time. That kid really sinks his teeth in when he gets interested in something! That's all for now, Joe
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