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Truck Woe, Caching Joy
Jan. 30th, 2011 10:40 pmThe paramour and I were out doing a bit of shopping yesterday afternoon. At the final store I forgot to turn off the lights on the truck and when we got back to it the battery was dead. We were only in the store for 30 to 40 minutes, which shouldn't be enough to drain a fully charged battery, but that battery is at least five years old so it's not a surprise if it's no longer able to hold much of a charge.
We tried to get a boost from someone else in the parking lot but the way our truck was positioned meant that our battery cables simply weren't long enough. Rather than continue accosting other drivers we called for a tow truck. 20 minutes later and $55 poorer we were up and running again.
While we were waiting for the tow truck the paramour tried to open the driver's side door of our truck when the entire mechanism suddenly seized up. We tried pulling up on the inside handle, to no effect. I got out a pair of pliers and used them to pull up on the door's lock button, but it wouldn't budge. I even gave the edge of the door a kick to see if I could dislodge it, but no luck.
They say that bad things come in threes so as we drove home I was half expecting us to get a flat tire as well, but we managed to make it back without any further problems.
Today the weather was good, for the first time in weeks, so rather than waste it trying to fix the lock I headed out to do some geocaching along the logging roads which crisscross Mount Hayes. Because of the stuck door on the driver's side I had to climb across the passenger seat to get in and out of the truck at each cache. If nothing else, it gave me a bit of a workout.
It was a very successful outing. I found all of the 12 caches that I searched for, although the find on the second cache was somewhat tainted. It was a two stage cache. In the first stage you had to find a key and in the second you had to find the cache and use the key to unlock it. I couldn't find the key or the cache. I was about to give up when the cache owner showed up. Several people had reported being unable to find the key so he wanted to check to make sure it was still there. He showed me where it was hidden, which was about 10 meters from where the GPS coords said it should be. So although I needed help to find it, I still logged the find since the GPS coords were off.
The icing on the cake was that I got to claim the coveted FTF (First To Find) on one of the caches. There was no FTF prize in the cache, just bragging rights, but it still felt nice. Given my penchant for sleeping late and being slow to get started in the morning, I'm rarely able to get to a newly posted cache before the early birds. I got lucky with this one, though. There was a batch of 11 new caches on Mount Hayes which were all published together about three days ago. Geographically they were in two more or less distinct groups. My FTF cache was a 12th one, published just yesterday, and located on a separate side road from all the others. So I think that all the other cachers we were out doing Mount Hayes today first headed for the two large groups of caches. I did it the other way around, picking up the outliers first before heading up the mountain to the largest group. It must have been a close thing, though, because by the time I got home two other geocachers had found the cache after me.
Even if I ignore the one tainted find, 11 caches in a single outing is still a new personal best for me.
Apparently I wasn't the only local geocacher suffering from a touch of cabin fever after the recent run of bad weather, because I ran into four other cachers during the course of the afternoon, none of whom I'd met before, which is also a personal best of sorts. I joined up with two of them for a while and we did four caches together before parting ways, which was nice.
We tried to get a boost from someone else in the parking lot but the way our truck was positioned meant that our battery cables simply weren't long enough. Rather than continue accosting other drivers we called for a tow truck. 20 minutes later and $55 poorer we were up and running again.
While we were waiting for the tow truck the paramour tried to open the driver's side door of our truck when the entire mechanism suddenly seized up. We tried pulling up on the inside handle, to no effect. I got out a pair of pliers and used them to pull up on the door's lock button, but it wouldn't budge. I even gave the edge of the door a kick to see if I could dislodge it, but no luck.
They say that bad things come in threes so as we drove home I was half expecting us to get a flat tire as well, but we managed to make it back without any further problems.
Today the weather was good, for the first time in weeks, so rather than waste it trying to fix the lock I headed out to do some geocaching along the logging roads which crisscross Mount Hayes. Because of the stuck door on the driver's side I had to climb across the passenger seat to get in and out of the truck at each cache. If nothing else, it gave me a bit of a workout.
It was a very successful outing. I found all of the 12 caches that I searched for, although the find on the second cache was somewhat tainted. It was a two stage cache. In the first stage you had to find a key and in the second you had to find the cache and use the key to unlock it. I couldn't find the key or the cache. I was about to give up when the cache owner showed up. Several people had reported being unable to find the key so he wanted to check to make sure it was still there. He showed me where it was hidden, which was about 10 meters from where the GPS coords said it should be. So although I needed help to find it, I still logged the find since the GPS coords were off.
The icing on the cake was that I got to claim the coveted FTF (First To Find) on one of the caches. There was no FTF prize in the cache, just bragging rights, but it still felt nice. Given my penchant for sleeping late and being slow to get started in the morning, I'm rarely able to get to a newly posted cache before the early birds. I got lucky with this one, though. There was a batch of 11 new caches on Mount Hayes which were all published together about three days ago. Geographically they were in two more or less distinct groups. My FTF cache was a 12th one, published just yesterday, and located on a separate side road from all the others. So I think that all the other cachers we were out doing Mount Hayes today first headed for the two large groups of caches. I did it the other way around, picking up the outliers first before heading up the mountain to the largest group. It must have been a close thing, though, because by the time I got home two other geocachers had found the cache after me.
Even if I ignore the one tainted find, 11 caches in a single outing is still a new personal best for me.
Apparently I wasn't the only local geocacher suffering from a touch of cabin fever after the recent run of bad weather, because I ran into four other cachers during the course of the afternoon, none of whom I'd met before, which is also a personal best of sorts. I joined up with two of them for a while and we did four caches together before parting ways, which was nice.
