Frisked!

FRISKED!!!

Well, almost.  More about that in a minute.

01 March, 2012 - the first geocaching expedition of the year.  A nice, clear, sunny day found We3 (aka Wiscongranny, Woodhick803, and BatikFreak) heading out for Bluefield, WV, to grab a few caches and to eat some good food. 

There were quite a few guardrail caches and a couple of fun finds, plus one did-not-find that we'll be laughing about for months to come.

Fun find #1:  A pinecone wannabee.  You can't tell much about the size from this photo, but the cache container was smaller than your pinkie finger.  Another fun thing about this cache was that it was hanging from the tree.  So many caches are on the ground, in the crook of a tree, etc, that putting them in a different place can throw off the cache hunters for a few minutes.

You can tell more about the size here.  Thanks, Woodhick, for giving me a hand with this photo.  (haha)

Fun find #2: A micro magnetic cache hidden on a tank?  You bet.  Hard to find?  You bet.  We finally broke down and read the hint on this one - "Beware of the track."  Okay, that narrowed it down a bit.

Can you find the cache container?  You can see about half of it here; small black magnetic key holder, just about in the center of the photo.











Now on to being frisked.  Personally, I don't think that WG, WH, and I look like shady people.  (WH may have when he had his anti-Bush ponytail, but that's another story....).  Our average age is, well, OLD.  We were in this nice little city-owned neighborhood park, looking for a cache, when one of the local homeowners appeared, wondering what we were doing and almost accusing us of no-good.  Although he didn't physically frisk us, he surely gave us the once, twice, thrice over.  After giving him a lengthy explanation of geocaching, he disavowed any knowledge of this hide-and-seek game.  However, a few minutes later, after he apparently decided that we weren't going to harm his precious park and fountain, he could tell us all about the cache, where it had been hidden, what it looked like, etc.  The whole spiel.  Woodhick thinks the gentleman spy had the cache in his pocket the entire time.  What was even more peculiar is that this man pointed in the general direction of his home, which couldn't be seen from the park.  Obviously, there are other eyes in the neighborhood and he was on protection duty that day.  We'll be laughing about this one for a while, I think.  At least it wasn't the police.

Good eating too.  Lunch at DQ - Wiscongranny's favorite for ice cream (Bluefield's DQ makes delicious hot dogs, by the way), dinner at Princeton's La Campestre.  Eating is as much a part of geocaching for us as the hunt.  After all, we are Georges.

A good day with good people.  (I had to say that - we're related.)  The next expedition on our calendar is a GC event - our first - near Huntington.  We are all going to set a travelbug free that day, from the same cache, and then in a year we'll see whose has gone the farthest.  Should be fun!

For more about the day, read Woodhick803's blog:  http://cachingin--geocachingme.blogspot.com/

For more about geocaching in general:  http://www.geocaching.com/

Until next time - Get outside and play!