Muy Frustrating!

This is a picture of Wee Willy. He is a geocaching dog and he asked his owner, Hikeaday, to send this picture to GeoPunkin. GeoPunkin had seen pictures of Wee Willy in the geocaching.com logs and wanted to meet him, so Hikeaday brought him by the house when doing a nearby cache one day. GeoPunkin has been a Wee Willy fan ever since.

With Hikeaday's help, Wee Willy has hidden a number of caches in the area and they are always a lot of fun to do because he puts a lot of thought into them. Some people (like me, at times) just throw some sort of container out there and post it as a cache. Wee Willy's caches are well hidden and well thought out.

After doing six Wee Willy caches on Monday, I was inspired to come up with a quality hide. There is a small memorial park about 2.5 miles from the house that I have been thinking about hiding a cache in for a number of months now. I never actually checked to see if there was already a cache there, but I didn't remember seeing one show up on the geocaching.com maps, so I headed out there with GeoPunkin Monday afternoon. I found the perfect spot! There is a fence that goes around the small park, and as I checked, I found the cap to once fence post was was loose so I "borrowed" the cap for the night, brought it home and created my cache.

I got a piece of string and glued it to the bottom of the cap. From the string, I suspended a medicine bottle (drilled hole through lid and tied a knot in the string to hold it). I also glued two stacks of pennies together to serve as a weight. Today, I went with Punkin's Momma, lowered the pill bottle down into the fence post and put the cap back on top of the post. Looked 100% natural, but if an observant/curious geocacher were to lift the cap, they would see the string and be able to get the cache.

So I recorded the coordinates, rushed home and filled out the info to hide another in my BINY In My Life series of caches. I filled out all of the necessary information and sent in my request to have the cache listed at geocaching.com. I was thrilled to get a response in just 10 minutes...until I saw it was a rejection! The form e-mail said my cache could not be listed because it was too close to another cache...within "0 feet" it said!!! I am not a newbie to geocaching, but this was definitely a newbie mistake. You ALWAYS check to see how close other caches are to the area where you want to hide your cache. If they are not at least 1/10th of a mile away (approx. 528 feet), you can't hide a cache in that location. I checked, and sure enough, there has been a cache in the park where I was trying to hide mine (not in the fence post, but in the exact same location), and it had been there for year! All of that work, and now I have to do disassemble my masterpiece tomorrow. Muy frustrating! (that's Texican)

Now I must not only find a new location for my cache, but I will probably have to find a whole new way to hide it creatively. I'll still have to use this idea someplace...it is just too cool not to.