Sunday, March 14, 2010
“Got Cache?” Event in Roseburg
Good caching friends ST13PILOT (Butch), norway sprint (Beckie) and Bad Duck (Darren) invited me to tag along with them for a day of caching around Roseburg before the GOT CACHE? pizza event hosted by local cachers. As I’ve noted in previous posts, geocaching is more fun when done with others…..so I said yes, of course!
First order of business was FTF honors on Butch and Beckie’s newly placed cache at the Sandy Creek covered bridge rest area. Darren had already made a nighttime visit last night but couldn’t find it…..until he got home and downloaded some pictures he took of the possible hidey holes in hard-to-reach and difficult-to-see places. One picture caught the tell-tale sign of a cache! So this morning he’s anxious to make the stop and check out his hunch! True to form, he went right to it and pulled it out just like he had placed it there himself!
None of us had any unfound caches to hunt until we got to Camas Valley where we started with a nice cemetery hunt called Those Pesky Critters. We noted a frosty 33 degrees and a temperature inversion in this pretty little valley. Headed into Winston then onto Roseburg after Butch-n-Beckie picked up a couple more in the area that Darren and I previously found.
Once in Roseburg, we adopted the “Next Closest Cache” strategy….with a couple of diversions. Started with a series of five “De Mayo” caches - one, of which, involved avoiding the direct view of a homeless “Vet” panhandling 5 feet from the cache container! Beckie volunteered to go engage the guy in conversation to divert his stare but we settled on a Butch-n-Beckie body blockade giving me a window to jump in and put the cache back! Teamwork! Funny thing about the guy’s sign….said he was a veteran with duty in Iraq but looked WAY too old to be believable! It gave us a chuckle anyway.
One highlight of the day was going for the Boys of Summer cache in the Gaddis City Park. This cache wasn’t the highlight, though we had to maneuver around a muggle dog-walker taking a rest nearby to snag it. No, the highlight was signing a log for a cache we were ill-prepared to hunt - Slaney’s Return - a mystery cache with a Sherlock Holmes theme. Thanks to Darren’s super-sharp memory from many months ago trying to solve this one, we poked around the logical hiding spots and finally made the discovery! Love it when you find a cache you weren’t expecting!
Finally it was time to get to the pizza parlor for the event - which was a lot of fun. Met many new cachers and saw old cacher friends as well. Great job on the event, TheKinneyKrew!
After the event we had a small convoy running around town picking off some caches we couldn’t find earlier but got valuable hints about at the event. Good to get a couple of pesky DNF’s off the list…..like Jose and BubbaJ!
The “Post Event” Mob signing the log!
Family Explorer at the Event