THE Lowly Peon

A first for my geocaching log 
14 August 2010, 9:02pm

After work yesterday, when it was 105F and there wasn't a cloud in the sky to protect me, I decided to go geocaching quickly before going up north to crash my colleague's weekly mexican food party.

It's exciting being in the states because there are caches everywhere. But unlike Chinese caches, each of these gets lots of traffic, and as a result, the trackables — the stuff with a code that you can log on the website to see where it's been — are often not there when they should be. For example, I'll go to a cache with five trackables, but it turns out someone got there before me, grabbed them, and hadn't logged it by the time i got there.

Anyway, I want to grab a few before I go to China because it's fun to take them far distances. But every cache I go to with inventory doesn't have any by the time I go. So I went to one near work with 8 trackables, figuring my odds were pretty good. I was wearing my awesome new polyester cowboy clothes, so I was pretty hot.

This particular cache was practically in the desert, except it was more like the kind of place Tony Soprano would have his guys to their enemies to bury them. So when I heard a car pull up, I figured it could either be someone with a big carpet rolled up with red coming from it, or a policeman/security guard wondering what the hell I was doing in this weird place.

Instead, I heard "hello, fellow geocacher?"

It was fun! I met a geocacher while geocaching! And we looked together for a while. She apparently is an expert with a zillion logged finds, and I was really hot and dehydrated and needed to go crash this party, so I kind of let her look for it while I provided moral support and pretended to look. She told me all about her caching, and she seemed to know all the big players in the area.

After a while, I gave up. Past logs suggested that the cache was 10m (!!) away from the coordinates (she said this was common for the guy who planted it). That's a long way. So i said farewell, and on my way out I found the cache, and grabbed a TB to take to china.

So that's a first for me! Meeting a cacher while caching. It was fun!