Caching Misadventures

I’ve realized lately that I’ve become a geocaching junkie. I suffer withdrawal symptoms if I haven’t found a cache yet today, and I crave creative finds. Sometimes I dream up creative cache containers in my sleep. When I drive around town, I notice places I think would make for great hides.

I also realize that I’ve done a couple of ridiculous things seeking out caches. When seeking out one of the waypoints on Zor’s “Jacob’s Bridge” Wherigo cache, I had to make my way to the island in Centennial Park. The bridge was gone at this point and it was the middle of summer, but paulie777 and I picked a day where the water levels were low. Still, I had to wade my way to the island through chest-deep water that was full of duck feces. The island was covered in droppings as well. While I waded to the island and back, paulie777 stood on shore taking photos with his iPhone and laughing his head off. When I got home, I had to strip off in the backyard and hose myself down, and soon after went to get a tetanus shot.

Over Easter weekend, I had another interesting experience. On my way home from Bangor, I stopped to get the very last cache in Maine before the border, “End of the Tour.” This cache is less than 200 m from the Maine-New Brunswick border near Houlton. You can actually see the border from the cache itself. And there is an airport visible less than 500 m south of the cache. I was heading back home late at night, trying to beat a snowstorm, and stopped to get the cache around midnight. After finding the cache, I decided to put my flashlight into the trunk of my car before going to cross the border. This is when the Houlton Police pulled up behind me. The officer had never heard of geocaching, and thought it was mighty suspicious that I would be on this dark road, that close to the border, at that hour of day, rifling around in my trunk. He asked to inspect the contents of my trunk, and there were a tense few minutes while he debated what to do with me. I think, in the end, he thought my explanation of geocaching was so preposterous that it had to be true.

Those are my ridiculous caching experiences. I can think of a few others – scouterscott breaking his ankle seeking out “‘Sara’sponda,” mousaka getting his car stuck on a backwoods road for almost 8 hours until a tow arrived, and TheNinjaJedi breaking through ice into a “frozen” lake when going for “Gilberts Cove.”

To what lengths and misadventures have you gone to get a cache?