Tuesday, May 18th, 2004
First Geocache Adventure
Today we began the adventure of Geocaching.
Lucas, Seth, Shin and myself piled into the car, armed with information on the geocache locations and my brand new GPS unit. How exciting! Lucas sat in the front seat with the pocket pc and kept an eye on the coordinates. He was letting me know if we were going in the right direction to find the cache.
We were all enthusiastic. Even Seth, strapped up in the back seat was visibly excited. We were on a mission; I think he could sense the growing suspense.
Lucas indicated we were close, so I pulled into the nearest parking lot. We got out and began our search.
We covered a LOT of ground. We went down the path, up the path, across a plain, through a swamp, all in vain. It was suprisingly difficult to make sense of these coordinates. We'd get so close, and yet one of the numbers were off. We didn't despair yet though: we knew there would be a learning curve.
It was quite funny: we took turns holding the unit, blindly following the moving numbers, with the other three right behind. Suddenly the leader would veer, and so would the followers, instantly adjusting course. We were getting nowhere. And all the time Seth's patient little pitter-patter behind us-- bringing up the rear.
Finally we got so close. But we were standing in the middle of the parking lot. This couldn't be right. We looked up, down, left, right-- hopeless.
"Let's try the next one," I said. I had brought a few geocache locations along, just in case we had trouble. We all agreed, and jumped in the car again.
When we got out at the new spot I couldn't believe our luck. "It's right here, exactly!" I said. We had stopped at exactly the right spot.
But no cache. We kicked around in the grass, but nothing. Again, the GeoCache had let us down. I looked at the notes again.
"Something's wrong," I sighed. "It says we should be walking down by the falls, which is like way over there!." I looked down again and read the notes.
You can park at Albion Falls (Co-ordinates are North 43 Deg 11.996 West 079 Deg 49.274.
I suddenly realised what was wrong. I had copied the locations of the parking lots! No WONDER there's no GeoCache here!
Next time I won't make that mistake. We'll have to try again another time.
Jason
Tags:hobbies geocaching 0 likes ↑