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Caching Misadventure
Jul. 11th, 2010 09:42 pmLast weekend the paramour and I went for a stroll along a path which winds through some of the lands bordering on the river estuary. There were four geocaches located in the area and my count was sitting at 96, so if we could find all four then I'd hit the meaningless-but-nonetheless-satisfying milestone of having found 100 caches.
Alas, we only managed to find two of them, leaving my count at 98.
This evening I set out for a section of Cedar Road which sports three caches, determined to find my 100th cache. I quickly found the first one, but half an hour of searching for the second left me empty-handed. I used my smartphone's geocaching app to check the cache's logs and discovered that the person who'd planted the cache had given faulty coordinates. Grrr! Someone else had been kind enough to provide more accurate coords but I wasn't able to track to them1 so I gave up and moved on to the next cache.
It was at the third cache that I locked myself out of the truck, leaving the keys still in the ignition. The passenger window was open far enough for me to squeeze my forearm in, but not enough to let me to reach the door latch.
The cap on the back of the truck was unlocked so I had access to all the junk sitting in the truck's bed to try and McGyver my way back in. My first idea was to attach a bungee cord to the end of a long piece of dowel. Sliding the contraption in through the passenger window I was able to use the bungee's hook to snag my keyring, but pull as I might I couldn't get the keys to come out of the ignition. They must have still been in the "locked" position. Grrr!
My second idea was to dangle the bungee down from the passenger window and try to hook the door handle. The handle is recessed into the door, which makes it tough, but with my forearm squeezed through the window I was able to get enough of an angle to make it work. It took several minutes of trying before I finally hooked the handle. I pulled up and the bungee stretched, and stretched, and...
*THWACK!*
The handle had come up, allowing the bungee to slip off and snap into my hand. Ouch.
The door lock button was up about halfway now, but that wasn't enough to unlock the door. So back at it I went. Two stinging concussions later, the button came up the rest of the way and I was able to get into the truck and retrieve my keys.
That still left the third cache to be tackled. It lay down a dirt path which locals appear to have been using as an illegal trash dump. When I got to the area specified by the coordinates I saw nothing special which might signify the location of the cache. Just rocks, trees and garbage, none of it outstanding in any way. I hate caches like that, the ones that drop you in the middle of a boulder field and tell you "it's under a rock" or deep into the forest and tell you "near the base of a tree". If GPS units were accurate to within a meter then such vagueness would be fine, but GPS accuracy is more like 10 meters and you can double that to include the inaccuracy of the unit used by the person who placed the cache. Searching every rock, tree and pile of garbage in a 20 meter radius is not my idea of fun.
Because of the time spent breaking into the truck, it was starting to get dark, so after a couple of minutes turning over the most promising bits of garbage I called it a day.
That leaves me sitting at 99 caches. Just one more to go!
Alas, we only managed to find two of them, leaving my count at 98.
This evening I set out for a section of Cedar Road which sports three caches, determined to find my 100th cache. I quickly found the first one, but half an hour of searching for the second left me empty-handed. I used my smartphone's geocaching app to check the cache's logs and discovered that the person who'd planted the cache had given faulty coordinates. Grrr! Someone else had been kind enough to provide more accurate coords but I wasn't able to track to them1 so I gave up and moved on to the next cache.
It was at the third cache that I locked myself out of the truck, leaving the keys still in the ignition. The passenger window was open far enough for me to squeeze my forearm in, but not enough to let me to reach the door latch.
The cap on the back of the truck was unlocked so I had access to all the junk sitting in the truck's bed to try and McGyver my way back in. My first idea was to attach a bungee cord to the end of a long piece of dowel. Sliding the contraption in through the passenger window I was able to use the bungee's hook to snag my keyring, but pull as I might I couldn't get the keys to come out of the ignition. They must have still been in the "locked" position. Grrr!
My second idea was to dangle the bungee down from the passenger window and try to hook the door handle. The handle is recessed into the door, which makes it tough, but with my forearm squeezed through the window I was able to get enough of an angle to make it work. It took several minutes of trying before I finally hooked the handle. I pulled up and the bungee stretched, and stretched, and...
*THWACK!*
The handle had come up, allowing the bungee to slip off and snap into my hand. Ouch.
The door lock button was up about halfway now, but that wasn't enough to unlock the door. So back at it I went. Two stinging concussions later, the button came up the rest of the way and I was able to get into the truck and retrieve my keys.
That still left the third cache to be tackled. It lay down a dirt path which locals appear to have been using as an illegal trash dump. When I got to the area specified by the coordinates I saw nothing special which might signify the location of the cache. Just rocks, trees and garbage, none of it outstanding in any way. I hate caches like that, the ones that drop you in the middle of a boulder field and tell you "it's under a rock" or deep into the forest and tell you "near the base of a tree". If GPS units were accurate to within a meter then such vagueness would be fine, but GPS accuracy is more like 10 meters and you can double that to include the inaccuracy of the unit used by the person who placed the cache. Searching every rock, tree and pile of garbage in a 20 meter radius is not my idea of fun.
Because of the time spent breaking into the truck, it was starting to get dark, so after a couple of minutes turning over the most promising bits of garbage I called it a day.
That leaves me sitting at 99 caches. Just one more to go!
1 I've since figured out how to set up a waypoint on the fly and track to it, so the next time this happens, I'm ready.
