This Time it WAS a Cache-tastrophe
05 Dec 2011 Leave a Comment
in cache, didn't find, found, geocaching.com, milestone Tags: container, didn't find, found, gsak, jajast, missing, occupy portland, portland
Jajast aka Bill aka Steve and I had a plan. It was an awesome plan. It was the plan to end all plans. And like all plans, and in the words of the immortal Robert Burns,those plans gang aft agley. I will be honest, the fault is all mine – well mine and gsak lol.
We had decided to head up to Portland Maine for our own personal cach-a-polooza. We have a mutual friend who found like 140 caches in one day up there *cough* Mrs. BritPitt *cough* so we figured we could easily get the 50 caches I needed to get me to 500. Boy were we wrong.
We had a center point of an earth cache in Portland (which was very cool btw) and I created a filter in GSAK with that as a center point. I refined the filter a bit for milage and types of caches and loaded up mo’gumbo the gps with 500 caches. This is nothing that I haven’t done before. Why it went so wrong will forever remain a mystery to me. We did do a virtual cache which was pretty cool too. I never realized that director John Ford was from Portland.
For some reason, hardly ANY of the caches in the area made it over to my gps. There were 500 caches, but they didn’t seem to exist once we got to Portland. I’d have one, but not the next one half a mile away. I have no clue what I did, but I did something. It was bizarre.
Added to that, we just couldn’t seem to get a rhythm going. There was no flow. We also found as we looked on Steve’s super duper gps that a lot of the caches had a lot of DNF’s. The last and biggest insult was us going to find a cache in Lincoln Park. We were, however, unable to search because the cache area and the whole park was occupied by the occupy Portland movement.
I had fun, because I was out and about caching with a wonderful friend, but I am really sad that I didn’t find 50 caches. I KNOW it’s not supposed to be about the numbers, and usually for me, it isn’t. But this one time, I really, really wanted it to be about the numbers. I wanted to hit 500 this weekend.
It didn’t happen, obviously, and while I’m not losing any sleep over it, I am a bit bummed. On a more positive and humorous side though, I have streak of 10 days of caching which for me is epic. However, today, I grabbed a cache on my way into work, and it was almost the biggest epic fail ever.
I found it quickly – it being INKY, and I took the container to my car to sign. I opened it and put it on my center console and watched as one half of it rolled down off the console and under the passenger side seat. I FREAKED. I was ready to rip the car apart to find the missing piece. I knew i had an exact duplicate of the container at home, and if worse came to worse, I could notify the cache owner and have him disable it for the day and replace it on my way in to work tomorrow. But luck was with me and I did manage to find the missing piece, sign the log and replace the cache and STILL get to work on time!
