do more geocaching

Together with my friend Mike, we are from time to time into an “extreme geocaching”. Sometimes its searching in a 2 feet deep snow during a wind storm, this time we decided to go for a night hunt in the place none of us has ever been before. So we went caching to Saranack and Ionia which are both somewhere between Lansing and Grand Rapids. It was freezing and snowing when we hit the road just to arrive at the first cache at 11:30pm. The shadows searching with the headlamp makes thing quite difficult since the light creates a lot of shadows, colors look different and so on. But you do not have to worry about the muggles ! After clearing Saranack area at 3 AM with 6 out of 8 finds we wanted to continue to Ionia, but the car broke and we got stucked in that tiny ghost town. The cell phone had no signal and the first payphone we phone just broke when we wanted to use it. Then we got attacted by a skunk at the second payphone. But we won and th ephone was “ours”. However at that moment the streelight above the phone broke, so we had to use our headlamps again … just to discover a flyer on the phone saying “This could be your final destination …”. That really started to be like from a David Lynch movie LOL !!! Anyway there was more details complicating our situation, but at the end we succeded to call my wife who started a search&rescue operation by her own and picked us up around 5:30AM. Until then we were freezing on the streets of Saranack ….
P.S. Would I do it again ? ... hell, yeah !!! ... I will ;-)

I went geocaching on Saturday. I was joined by 2 friends and we searched for 5 caches near Traverse City, MI. The weather was not that bad but there was almost 2 feet of snow. We found three caches but missed the other two, although we spent almost an hour digging in snow, excavating every fallen tree, stump or suspicious stone. Very exhausting but great experience !!

Due to my running injuries I was not feeling like running or skiing on Saturday. My wife also decided to stay home “just relaxing” so the possibility to go out for the full day of geocaching was wide open. Shortly before noon I started “cleaning” the southern part of our campus. I found three caches, but the rest seemed to be in rather busy urban areas, which did not seem to be attractive to me. So I went to my office to print out new maps. My friend Ivan called then that he can join me after 3pm, which he also did. In the meantime I went to Lansing downtown, which I assumed will be deserted on weekend, to look for two microcaches. I found none of them and left frustrated. Anyway … I thought it’s bad luck, now I will pickup Ivan and we can start searching in a nerby park with some 9 caches in total. Well … we started with a multi cache only to get to stage three out of four not able to locate the little micro container. I was becoming desperate, but Ivan was still of a good spirit. There was supposted to be another classic cache nearby, so we just continued there. But again, even after half an hour we were not able to find anything. 4 unsuccesfull searches in a row made me wonder, and I guess you can imagine how great difference it was with respect to last Sunday when I scored 9 out of 9 in one afternoon. ... so we left the park empty handed not even trying the nearby letterbox. We rather moved to a neighbouring park with 3 caches, fortunatelly finding them all rather quickly, since it was getting already quite dark and chilly. Total score was 6 out of 10, which does not look that great, but I think that really does not matter and is part of this great sport.

Fourth cache of the day nicely hidden in fresh snow.

Third cache of the day hidden in an old log.

The first cache found last Sunday. Somewhat exposed, so before I left I hid it better.

It was a bitterly cold day, but there was a lot of sun – just perfect for geocaching. This time I went alone, since the last geocaching partner was out of town. First I was not sure if I will like it alone, but it turned out to be just a great enjoyable experience. I made a list of caches I want to find and looked for them one by one. I visited some parks which are normaly full of people, but thanks to Saturday’s snowstorm and today’s freezing temperatures (-15 C) almost nobody was out. All the forest, parks, rivers and creeks belonged only to me ! LOL ! I found 9 caches including 2 travel bugs and placed one travel bug from last weekend myself. I will have to do this again, there is some special magic about winter geocaching.

During the week I went three times after the work to look for a hidden cache. It was great, but just too short. It was always getting dark too soon and also kinda too cold. So I really could not wait till the weekend to go geocaching for the whole day. I made a big preparations, I printed out the maps and descriptions of some 30 caches in the vicinity of my house, I divided them into the groups like which caches should be looked for together, which go first, which next and so on. I also send out email to my friends if somebody wants to join me. It turned out that almost nobody new what geocaching is, exactly like me just a week ago. Anyway, one of my friends joined me. We went out for the whole afternoon with temperatures around -8 C and a sudden moderate snowstorm. But the geocachings turns out to be like a drug, so we really did not care about the weather. The first find of the day was hard, took us almost 40 minutes since the coordinates were off by some 50 feet. The second find was my first multicache. It was in the park with many trails, and it turned out that the least suspected trail lead to the cache. We almost wanted to give up, but after an hour we found it. We took a picture with the camera which was inside. In the third cache was a travel bug, the first one I have found. Then it was getting already quite late, but we could not resist the temptation to get some more. Fortunatelly the next two were easy finds rounding our daily score to five. Great day, great hunt !!

It was supposed to be an easy one, but everything was covered with snow and was already getting quite dark. But the cache was finally found, frozen and covered with ice. It took a while to open it … in the meantime my adrenaline level went really high. Great experience. Now I want more … LOL !!