New Friends On The Trail

I had a very good Saturday. I went geocaching (big surprise) with one of the more respected cachers in the area, AllenMabry. Allen liked going after more difficult hides and had about 15 or so he wanted to grab in Garland. So out plan was to meet up at Lottie Watson Park and grab the two caches there, then move on to others in the area. I had not cached Garland before so I was a little unsure of the styles of the hiders but it was all good. As matter of fact I managed to spot over 50% of the caches before my partner did. But to tell the whole story, I would not have attempted many of these solo. They were hard, in difficult locations and out of my normal caching zone.

We started off by meeting a father and son team saintmain and Travasours to knock out three hides early then Allen and I moved on and grabbed 11 more. I started the day off early and grabbed one along the way (Talley Ho!) to the park. It was one that has been a thorn in my side for quite some time and I was glad to finally knock it out.

"Did Bonnie and Clyde Drive a Bel Air?"

Baby Copperhead (caching has its dangers)

Good craftsmanship on this one

All in all I grabbed 15 caches...one was a 3/3 (out of a 5/5) and I managed to spot both parts of that multi-stage before Allen did. That really boosted my confidence quite a bit. We were out for about eight hours before my wife called and reminded me that I needed to ge back home. She was laughing and said that I was regressing back to my childhood years when I used to run the woods all day and come home sweaty and tired at supper time. I think she was right!

I got home and cleaned up, eating a burger and fries from one of the best places around here to get a burger, Scotty P's. After that I entered all my finds (pics and logs/notes) on to the geocaching web site. With 15 finds it took a while but it was worth it. I am just 12 hides away from 500 finds but I will not be getting any next week since I am on house arrest and my office mate is on vacation. so 24 hours a day for seven days I am it. I hope to plan a nice outing to get my 500th hide in a couple of weeks. Until then I hope to grab a few on the way home from work to pad my numbers. I just need to find a hide worth of number 500. None of my other milestones have been very memorable except one and that was hide number 200. It has taken me 3/4 of a year to get 500...I was hoping for 1000 but when you have a life it is hard to take time out to grab that many caches in 12 months. Getting 1000 finds in 365 days is 2.7 per day and I am averaging 1.7 per day. Not bad and to be honest it is not about how many but how memorable they are and how much you enjoy them.