The Kindness of Others

 I have a couple geocaches hidden with-in a few miles of my house. Recently, I was driving down rt.8 and passed the location of one of them. There was a tractor cutting the grass and weeds near where the cache was located. Fearing the worst, I came back an hour or two later only to find the fallen tree that the cache was hidden under, was gone.

    I looked around and saw nothing. The hide was about 10 feet away from the normally mowed grass. The log stretched out to where the grass was cut. I looked under the debris the mower had left behind, the broken and cut sticks and leaves and also looked over the edge of the hillside behind the cache site. There was no sign of the container or any of the items inside it. I saw the log over the hillside and worked my way down to it and nothing was there either.

    These hides are only a game and when one disappears, it’s no big deal. Still, I was a bit saddened. I went home and temporarily disabled the cache.

    A day or two later, I received an e-mail from Geocaching.com saying that someone had my cache and to contact them to get it back. Soon I had the container and its contents in hand.

    The man driving the tractor saw the container when the blades hit it. The mower had cracked the container. Seeing that it was part of the game of geocaching, he contacted the web site and they contacted me. He works for the township and has taken his kids out geocaching a couple times. He could have just left it or thrown it away but being a good human being, he took that extra step and got the container back to me.

    It has since been re-hidden, in the same spot only under some rocks now instead of a log. Thanks to the kindness of Tom, the cache is back in business and ready to be found again. We can all use a little kindness, do your part in passing it around! Pay it forward, I know I will!

     Cache on!

Searching for Something in the Morning

 

                I woke up this morning and looking out the window, saw a small amount of fresh snow on the ground. The sun was attempting to brighten up the brownish looking landscape.  I felt as if I needed to get some fresh air and stretch my legs. After tossing some laundry in the washing machine, I took a drive to a spot I had been eyeing for a few weeks.

                The place I was going to was a park located near Rt.910 and the reason I was going there was to find another geocache. This one was located in a tunnel? Actually I knew that wasn’t true, it was only its name.

                “Tunnel Vision”, It was listed as a 2.5 out of 5 in difficulty and 3 out of 5 in terrain.  The description of the cache had a picture from the 1960’s TV show “The Time Tunnel”!  Cool! It was just what I needed to get me some exercise and to wake my brain up.

                OK, the cup of coffee I took along helped with waking me up, but the trip helped also!

                I parked outside of the park and headed into the woods alongside of the road. I found what used to be a road maybe 10-20 years ago. It was flat and every once in awhile I’d see an old wooden guard rail post. Watching my GPS, I knew I was heading in the correct direction. There were lots of fallen logs and jagger bushes on it.

                I was a little bit afraid that I might come to a cliff overlooking where I wanted to go but I lucked out and found the spot without any difficulty. I won’t mention the weeds and brambles I went through…

                In front of me was a collection of various sized sewer pipes. Some where large enough to walk through and some were only a foot or two high. Most of them were about 5’ high. They had been sitting here for quite awhile. I could tell that I wasn’t the first to find them. Other than the fact that a geocache was hidden here and others had found it, there were some slight paths around the pipes. No one had been here recently, the little bit of snow still on the ground was unbroken. I saw a bit of graffiti that had a date on it from last May. There was no litter and other than the writing I saw, nothing was defaced.  It was just a bunch of pipes out in the woods.

                It was rather tough finding where the cache was hidden. I figured it was somewhere in the pipes. But I couldn’t get satellite reception inside the concrete. I walked around them a couple times and tried to triangulate where the spot would be. Finally I just started going through them and checking between the cracks. I wasn’t sure what size the cache would be. It could be a pill bottle or it could be an ammo can. Luckily for me, it was an ammo can.

                Going through my third set of pipes I saw the bark of a tree lying across something. Moving it I found the hide!  I pulled off my gloves and opened it up and signed the log.  I took a picture or two then put my gloves back on and headed back to the car. I took a different path this time and was soon back at the car. My washing was waiting for me…I headed back home. Happy, exercised and full of fresh air. I was ready for the rest of my day!

                Happy Caching!