Mixed Day

I played hooky from work yesterday (I have more vacation time than I know what to do with) and decided to, guess what, go GEOCACHING. Since the price of gasoline is over $4 a gallon (I have found it near $3.90 in a few places) my caching is very close and I tend to bike when I can. With that in mind I decided to attempt to finish up the Chisholm and Bluebonnet Trails in Plano, about 10 miles away. The day ended with mixed results.

I got up and prepped to get ready to go. My wife had an event with the women from church so me not being home all morning/early afternoon was not a big thing. I packed my geobag (backpack), got my bike ready, grabbed some bottled water, and headed out. First stop, to repair a cache that has been reported missing.

I arrive at the park to replace the cache but I notice that the cache is in place, albeit damaged. I replace the container, tether it, and head out to the bike paths. I stop along the way to grab a cache or two that I have been meaning to get but just never seem to have time to stop. Well, today I had that time.

I arrived at the bike park around 8:00 AM and started out. I grabbed several and whiffed on a few. I ended up on the wrong side of the creek several times (Garmin was not overly for me) but overall enjoyed my trip...that is until I got not one but TWO flat tires. Trail riding has its hazards. Luckily I was on my way back and had only about .5 miles to go. I got back to my truck and put the bike in the back and headed home.

I checked my logs and realized that I was just 2 caches away from a milestone...500 finds. There was no way I was going home short of that goal so I headed towards the Plano Dog Park and headed out to find at least 2 more caches. I had to dissassemble my bike and put it inside the truck (popping a small hole in my otherwise immaculate headliner in the process) to keep it from getting stolen...come on this IS the Dallas Metro here! Flat tires or not, someone is going to steal it.

I started off and manged to grab to more caches, striking out on the others. I realize it is after 1:00 PM so I decided not to head to North Allen/South McKinney (where 5 new hides have been placed) and just head home.

I get home and log all my finds and post a note that "Shell Shock", my latest hide, has been repaired.

So my geocaching day was mixed. I set out after 21 hides and DNF'd on 9 of them. I missed another one but that was not my fault so I did not log it as a Did Not Find (it was a puzzle caches and after I solved it, I e-mailed the owner to verify the coords. He told me the coords I mailed hime were correct. He was wrong. I was off by one digit making the find impossible at that time).

So I found 12, DNF'd on 9 (the largest number of same day DNF's in my caching career). However, I did reach my 500th find milestone and managed to get a few harder (3's and 4's) caches along the way. I also managed to ge two fla tires and slightly damage the headliner of my truck, but I did get a lot of great exercise and had a very good time while I was out.

Oh, here is a breakdown (as of yesterday) of my caching stats:

Total: 501 finds

* Total days since first find: 289
* Overall find Rate: 1.74/day, 12.16/week
* Total days with a find: 130 (Every 2.2 days or 45.1% of your total days)
* Average finds per caching day: 3.85
* Best day: 5/10/08 - 20 finds (High for me, low for some people)
* Most consecutive days with a find: 10 from 9/27/07 to 10/06/07 (Right when I first started caching without a GPSr I was HUNGRY for caches!)
* Longest caching drought: 14 days from 9/13/07 to 9/26/07 (this was the two weeks after my first cache find in WV with friends and when I decided to give geocaching a try on my own...without a GPSr -- urban caching)
* Average total cache difficulty: 1.8 (most urban caches are usually 1 to 2 in difficulty)
* Average total terrain rating: 1.68 (most urban caches are usually 1 to 2 in terrain)
* Average physical cache difficulty: 1.81 (virtual caches are not included in this)
* Average physical terrain rating: 1.69 (Traditional, Multi, Unknown, Project APE, Letterbox)
* Approximate cache-to-cache distance: 3739.52 miles (how many miles I have walked, driven, and biked to get caches (not counting locationless caches)
* Active Caches: 473 of the caches you've found are still active (94.4%)
* Average log size: 43.8 words
* Biggest log: 256 words
* Shortest log: 3 words
* Number of one-word logs: 0

Okay, if geocaching and statistics bore you...you are prolly asleep by now!