Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Cache Money!

While blogging in the conventional sense isn’t of interest to me (Hi my name is Mark and last night I walked my dog and watched TV) I still think that I want the people of the world to know about the fun things I do. Which is why I made my kind of dormant food blog. And which is why the show must go on for the Waffle House Chronicles as my do all site. I just got back from a cruise and if you want to see tons of cruise photos, look me up on Facebook. I’ve posted a couple hundred photos I am sure. So for now this blog will chronicle my adventures of travel, geocaching and whatever else I do that seems noteworthy beyond the day to day events.

This past weekend we were really looking forward to hitting some caches. And then overnight on Friday night we got 6” of fresh powder. Which I thought would stop us…but I was wrong as Jess was dedicated big-time. The first cache was on the Ice Age trail and no one had been out there yet so we blazed our own path!
Perfect trail though and the dogs loved it!

The second cache was a quick park and grab in Verona and the third was in a nice wooded park which required more trailblazing and Jess used some good cache instincts.


After that we looked for an elusive cache near our house that we still couldn’t find. Oh well, 3 out of 4 isn’t bad.

Sunday was cold and we still had lots of snow. But we went out nonetheless. We had a large lists of caches to get so it was going to be quite the adventure. We started near the Circuit City/Taco Bell area on the west side and got two caches, one of which was supposed to be pretty tricky. After hitting some Taco Bell for lunch we hit a puzzle cache in a cemetery. We quickly figured out the puzzle thanks to the new geocaching application on the IPhone as the puzzle was stuck on a sheet of paper in our printer and we forgot to bring it and then scored the cache!
We went from there to another cache near a Madison eatery which was only hard because of the snow and because of the people around. Cache 5 was a multicache where you find a cache and it gives you directions to the next cache until you get to the final, this one was easy but all that programming of the GPS made our hands cold. We then headed towards Middleton to get some caches out that way. Cache 6 was simple walk down a path and find it in a big tree. #7 rocked though, we had to climb onto rocks under a steep bridge and then did for it. It took us a while to find so it felt like a nice score. #8 was another park and grab although we had to walk maybe ¼ of a mile which is a bummer because there is a bike path I’ve never been on that would’ve got us all of these last 3. Cache 9 was a small magnetic cache in Middleton. That was the end of our successes, 9 in a row. #10 was a puzzle cache but the coordinates were messed up and we never did find it (as things were more than weird.) I am almost certain I know where to look now. So we went out towards the Middleton Airport and failed on the next two as well. One hasn’t been found in months and there was a lot of ice build up so we will have to wait until spring. The other was a very similar situation and by that point we were cold, wet, discouraged, hungry and running behind time so we bailed quick and headed home. All and all 12 caches are nice, 75% completion rate is a bit of a bummer though but what can you do? We were 5 for 5 earlier this week so all is good! Looking forward to the big Iowa Cachefest this weekend, hoping to net at minimum 50. February will be our best caching month ever with 3 states, 2 islands within a US Territory (US Virgin Islands) and 2 foreign countries.