Up And At It Early This Morning

Last night, when Amanda and I came home from geocaching, I received an automated e-mail telling me another cache has been placed near my home. It was too late to go back out, plus I am not good at night caching, so I set my alarm for 6am and decided to see how I felt about it in the morning.

When the alarm went of at 6:00, I felt I had gotten enough rest for the night, so I got up, got dressed, grabbed by GPS, my Palm Pilot and a pen and headed out for the new cache. You see, being the FTF (first to find) is a big deal.

The park was right in front of an apartment complex. It was still dark when I arrived, so I followed my GPS signal and took my flashlight with me. It seemed clear that the cache (it was a 'micro' so it was very small) was hidden in one of two trees. The apartment complex overlooked the park, and as I was shining my flashlight in every nook and cranny of this tree, one of the complex tenants came out onto his balcony for his morning smoke. I had to choose between continuing my search thus looking suspicious and having some sort of security called or acting like a casual park walker and sit on a bench thus loosing precious time. I chose to sit on the bench until he was done with his smoke.

The guy finally went back inside, and it took me another 15 minutes to find the cache. When I did, I took it back to the bench to fill out the log. As I was doing this, another car pulled up next to mine, turned around and left. There were only two parking spaces for the park (since it was mostly for the apartment people), so I figured it was probably a fellow geocahcer. Sure enough, the car left, pulled around to a parking lot nearby and waited. I finished logging my cache, went on to find the bonus cache (the one I found had the GPS coordinates for a second cache within walking distance). I walked back to my car after finding the second cache (second FTF for the morning!) and saw the car was still sitting in the other parking lot. I waved and got in my car to go home.

Since I had to drive past the parking lot where the other car had been sitting in order to get home, I pulled into the parking lot to see if it was indeed a fellow geocacher and to say hi. He was leaving, but when I stopped, he rolled down his window. I asked if he was a geocacher and he say "Yes, I just thought I'd let you finish before I came over." We talked for a few minutes then he went on to be the second to find (not nearly as prestigiouis as FTF!) and I went on home to get ready for work. I was up and at it early this morning.

- Rob