OK, since today is my day to leave work early, I decided to try for three geocaches that were more or less right on my route for home. The first one was in the park, not far from the one I failed to find Monday but did locate on Tuesday. Placed by the same person, in fact. I did not find it. I spent nearly an hour wandering in the right area, as the GPS seemed to keep changing its mind where I should be. When I started to get frostbitten fingers I abandoned that attempt. At the end the gadget was wanting me to go outside the park boundary and into someone's back yard. If that was correct, nothing doing. But I don't think it was right.

The second was very easy, except for the problem of not being obvious about what I was doing, because it was in a WalMart parking lot. ;p I parked my car so as to shield the site from most of the possible observers and furtively grabbed the thing, sitting in the car to sign the log, and then slipping it back into place. I think that worked. This time the GPS was pretty accurate about the location, so the only puzzle was where to look, and previous log comments had made that fairly clear.

The third was right along the road on my normal route to and from work. I'd already worked out the approximate location, and there are many split and hollow trees right there. I was sure it would be in a hollow, but it wasn't. Fortunately, the GPS was right on target this time, telling me that the car was one foot from the cache. Well, I was on the wrong side of the road to be one foot from it, but that was obvious. Sure enough, it was directly across the road, just not in a tree hollow. It was very tiny, about as small as I imagine you could make one. The log was a strip of paper rolled up tightly and inserted into one of those plastic bullet-shaped containers intended to hang from a pet's collar and hold contact information. I almost missed it because it was too obvious even while not being obvious, if you know what I mean. Clever.

I can see how you'd get better from practice. I started out with no idea what to look for, and now I'm starting to have some idea, at least for the tiny ones. So now I'm three for four, and willing to try some more but not today. Gotta go clean barns and by the time I feed everyone it will be dark (and bitter cold.)

Tags: geekery, geocaching
Current Location: Frozen oak grove
Mood: dorky

Went back to the site of the geocache "Just relax" (GC1DAVT) and armed with a description of the container I was able to locate it. It was out of place, lying in the snow nearby. Because we had heavy snow during Christmas vacation, the park has been swarming with kids and sleds. My guess is that one of them found it and instead of putting it back in the hiding place just dropped it in the snow. Most of the snow has melted now and it was visible once I knew what to look for.

I went ahead and logged it as a "find" since I did look in the right place yesterday. Wouldn't have found it without the added information from the cache owner, though, so it's really only half a success. My curiosity is piqued now, and I'm going to have to try a few more. There are plenty right around here, no problem with that.

Tags: geekery, geocaching
Current Location: At work, alas
Mood: bouncy

A five day week is going to seem incredibly long now, and here it is staring me in the face.

Happily, the week after that has only two work days, because I'll be attending a weaving workshop on the other three.

Unhappily, that means I have to get the workshop loom warped for the project I'll be doing, which in turn means finishing the warp that's already on there. Not enough hours... I have to sleep too.

Having looked at the information for some of the nearby geocaches, I begin to wonder how much of the challenge is finding a cache and how much is managing to open it, sign the log, seal it back up, and replace it without being obvious. There are two caches (GC1DAVM and GC1DAVT) right in the park surrounding the library. They would have to be pretty exposed. A third (GC1FBCA) is apparently at or very near the statue of a cow that graces Harvard's main intersection. That's even more exposed.Another (GC1EGHX) is apparently right alongside the road on my way to work, just 1.5 miles from home. From looking at the GPS map, I'm pretty sure I know the area in question and there are lots of possible hiding places there, but again it's exposed to passing road traffic all the time.

We have a couple of letterboxes hidden right in the library, but those work a little differently. At least in our case, it would be pretty easy to access one of them, enter the log, and return it to its place without attracting any attention.

The Geocaching web site and Garmin's own site are able to transfer cache coordinates directly to the GPS. However, that only works if you are running Windows 2000 or higher and Internet Explorer, apparently. Fortunately, it's easy enough to enter the location data manually. It consists only of a latitude and longitude, with a code name beginning with "GC" attached. I downloaded some this morning using Gary's Windows computer, but just now I entered several manually and it really took no longer. Of course you have to be careful about errors in entering the coordinates, but that's not too hard.

As soon as I get a lunch break where it isn't drizzling or a minus 40 wind chill, I'm going to have to go try to find one of these that are right near the library.

Tags: geocaching, holidays, work
Current Location: Frozen oak grove
Mood: curious