bl(ip)og

Our friends Josh and Steve had been talking about geocaching (‘the sport where you’re the search engine’) for awhile, so I was very happy to have gotten a GPSr for my birthday from Jason and his mom. Yay for boyfriend-approved geeky things, especially ones that involve being outdoors in the summer!

With self-confidance to spare (after finding all of the caches that we looked for last weekend), Jason, JAK and I set out to find Amazing Arboretum II and Middle of Nowhere yesterday.

Grrrrrr

‘Amazing Arboretum II’ really sucked. It’s tough enough looking for something as small as ‘a small waterproof match container with a magnet glued to the cover’ (that requires a special retrieval tool that you have to bring yourself), but it’s damn near impossible when your GPSr is telling you that you’re 0 feet from the location, oh wait — make that 5 feet, … oh wait .. 12 feet? I had no idea that GPSr readings could fluctuate that much! After 20 minutes of looking, we both said “screw this” and went after ‘Middle of Nowhere’, which was a piece of cake. FWIW, even if our GPSr lead us to the exact coordinate, I doubt we would have found it without decrypting the hint on the caches webpage, which we didn’t do before we left.

On the way home from the middle of nowhere (a very aptly named cache), we decided to swing by the beach and look for Under the Boardwalk. No dice — couldn’t find that one either.

Having only found 1 of 3 caches really put me in a shitty mood. How hard can it be find hidden things when you have the technology to guide you to their exact coordinates? Took watching 114 people die in a flaming air disaster (”Seconds from Disaster: The Concord”) and an awesome dinner by Jason to cheer myself up.

Later in the evening I read a very awesome “Geocaching Beginners Guide and Tutorial” which completely changed my understanding on how GPSrs work (and made me feel a lot better about the crap we went thru with the 2 caches we couldn’t find). Yay.