Wow, I knew it had been a long time since I had posted anything, but I had no idea I missed the entire month of February. Well, for the fifteen of you who visited my site in the last week, I apologize for not having anything new for you to read.
This past weekend I hid a new Geocache. This is somewhat noteworthy because it was the 25th Geocache I have hidden. Sure, I own 38 Geocache listings, but some of them were caches I adopted from other people and some were events I had hosted. This was the 25th time I went out, picked a spot and hid the thing myself.
Now, I think it turned out pretty well considering it was a rather spontaneous idea. I had my eye on a particular section of land along Highway 22X on the south edge of Calgary for awhile. I knew there had been a couple of caches there a few years ago, but since then the area had been vacant. With nothing else planned for the weekend I decided this would be the time to finally get out and do a couple of hides.
I dug through my caching cupboard gathering the basic supplies. Logbooks, pencils, some cammo tape, and a few travel bugs I had been holding on to for far too long. I came across a small pill container and decided that rather than placing two Traditional caches I would hide a single Multi cache, with the small container holding the coordinates for the final larger container.
I grabbed the dog and took off out the door to scout some hiding places and grab the coordinates. Along the way I started thinking of how I could tie this cache to a dog theme, since the location I had selected was in an off-leash dog area. Well, as always happens when I have too much time alone, I started getting lost in my own thoughts and things started to spiral out of control. I finally decided to turn it into a Puzzle cache, leveraging an idea I’ve had for several years but had sort of forgotten about.
After going home and putting the final touches on the two containers, returning to the location and submitting my cache page to Geocaching.com I just had to sit back and wait for it to be published on the site.
So, how does this end up with me sending a man to the hospital? Well, after the cache was released the first seeker went to look for it and — well, maybe I’ll just let him tell the story in his own words…
Takin it Easy’s log
“A memorable cache for us. We had gotten back from Vancouver very early this morning and decided to sleep in after the kids left for school. When we finally checked our e-mail, we noticed this new cache close to home. This one met our <10km from home FTF criteria so we decided to go for it even though it was late in the day. We were able weed through the hints and solve the puzzle fairly quickly, so we headed out to a familiar place to go for a short stroll. I left my hat at home as it was damp from a walk on the coast yesterday. It was chilly out but it wasn’t too windy and the walk to GZ wasn’t too bad. When we realized we had more to do, an incredible wind picked up and the place was a complete whiteout. WOW!!! I told Mrs. TiE to head back to the car while I headed over to the cache. When I found the cache, I felt my ears go completely numb. Oh no! I had that feeling once before when I was a kid and it wasn’t a pleasant experience. I signed in and then ran back to the car to find that both my ears were completely white and frozen. I was hoping it was a mild case of frostbite, but headed over to the hospital to be safe. The pain of the blood flow returning to my ears was excruciating. I ended up with swollen red ears and a bit of blistering and will need to apply some burn cream for awhile, but I should be fine. A lesson learned… I’ll be packing 2 or 3 hats in my gear from now on as I’m told I’ll be susceptible to this from now on. This makes our 100th FTF. A milestone and a sure memorable one. Nice job on the puzzle and the hides DanOCan. Thanks!”
There ya go, that’s how I sent a man to the hospital.
* I realize not everyone who reads this is a cacher so I should define the acronyms used in his log. The following are lifted directly from http://www.geocaching.com/about/glossary.aspx
FTF: First to Find. An acronym written by geocachers in physical cache logbooks or online when logging cache finds to denote being the first to find a new geocache.
GZ: Ground Zero. The point where your GPS device shows that you have reached the cache location. At Ground Zero, you are zero feet (or zero meters) away from your destination.
DanOCan 