Geocaching (or How to Truly Test the Bonds of Your Love)

After several false starts (e.g. it's too cold, there's too much snow, I'd rather be watching TV), Anne and I finally started geocaching. The premise is simple enough. Someone hides a container (called a cache) gives you the co-ordinates (and hints) and you go and find it. (For a better explanation, see http://www.geocaching.com/). We figured that it would be a better use of my GPS PDA than playing Freecell in the bathroom, and it would get us outside and moving. Everyone knows there's no better way to lose weight than getting outside and moving, unless it's Dancing with the Stars, but neither of us is famous enough, or washed up enough, to be eligible.

It snowed on our first foray, and the first signs of "Why the hell does this idiot get to use the GPS when he can't find north with it?" were already beginning to show. I got the two caches we were looking for that day mixed up and was looking for three-trunked trees when I should have been looking for pine trees. Then we discovered lesson number one of geocaching. Never use Google Maps for geocaching without writing down the original co-ordinates. Google Maps likes to change the co-ordinates you input to something that it recognizes, which explains why we roamed around an empty schoolyard for 15 minutes. When we finally did get our acts together, the find was relatively easy, and all was well again.

The second location required us to read the clue more closely, because we thought the park it was in was closed, when it really meant, "The parking lot is down the street". Besides we were tired and the snow was getting heavier. So, we decided that we'd have enough excitement for that day and just went home.

Then the addiction started to kick in, slowly, subtly, but surely. We had an hour or two to kill before the Jann Arden concert, and the answer to, "What do you want to do for dinner?" was "How about the food court at the Eaton Centre? That way, we have more time for geocaching." And we both came up with the same answer!

It started off well, with a quick dash to Old City Hall to find the "secret" message there that Anne had shown her ESL students hundreds of times. No brainer, and Anne got to take pictures of some of the carvings on Old City Hall, including the subject of said message.

The next closest cache was at (New) City Hall, but we actually had to find something, and we had been warned that with all the tall buildings downtown, the GPS signal was going to be unreliable. So, we walked to where we thought the co-ordinates were, and found nothing, and then became a little self-conscious as we were looking at the ground and in planters, and muttering at each other. Then I made an amazing discovery that started that downward spiral towards four-letter words. The dot on the GPS that I thought was the location of the cache was actually, well, a dot on the GPS that had nothing to do with the cache. Anne merely shrugged and smiled and asked me where we were supposed to go.

Go west!

Then I could hear our hearts beating faster, because all we could see in that general area was construction, and more construction. So soon after Mayor David Miller's Earth Day event, anything on the ground would be gone by now, but we kept looking around, and wishing that my geocaching program would update faster so that we had a better idea of where to look. We went from tree to tree to flag pole to tree to planter, and finally gave up. Anne merely shrugged and smiled and forced me to call a more experienced geocacher for help.

After we got the help and found the cache, it was clear that the shrugging and smiling was just Anne's way of putting her frustrations into a tiny black star in her giant heart, as shortly after that, the star went supernova. Everything Anne said suddenly included four-letter adjectives. Why? Because she was within 4 inches of it 15 minutes ago, and it would bitten her on the nose if it could. But she thought it couldn't be it, because, after all, we were looking for a 35mm film canister. Wrong. Frank merely shrugged and smiled and commented on how relieved he was they found it.

The other two virtual caches were relatively simple to find, as long as you ignored the GPS, because it had us up the street and around the corner. All that money in the financial district was causing the GPS signals to bounce all over the place.

This past Sunday, being it was a gorgeous day, we decide to try the one we gave up on. This time, we still hadn't really read the clue and ended up parking on the wrong end of the park. This isn't a big deal until you realize that your geocaching program was still not updating its location fast enough, and that left and right are relative to the direction you are walking in. Oh, and the area where the cache is hidden is ... squishy, and partly under water. After having been warned that the cache itself might also be under water, we started prodding around with tree branches, and getting water in our shoes, and still being too timid to just stuck our arms into the mini, dirty, disgusting, pond.

When we finally figured out that we weren't going to find it, we made our way to the proper parking lot, and started to follow the clues in the cache description. Problem #1. There's no grass path nearby, just lots of grass. But we managed to make it back to the exact same spot that we were already looking in, and then Frank lost his bearing and couldn't tell north from south, and the geocaching program was still not updating fast enough. Then the frustration set in, and Anne wasn't going to waste any more time going around in circles, and both our shoes were soaked, and we still had grocery shopping to do. I think if you looked closely enough, you could see steam coming out our ears, and we stomped off, mad at each other.

Yet, at the end of the day, when we finally got home, when I looked into Anne's eyes, there was still that look, that spark, that something beautiful that only I could see, because it was reserved for just me, because she still loves no-sense-of-direction me.

Oh, the story does have a happy ending. We got some more hints from a more experienced geocacher and went back to that same spot on Monday, but "just a little north", and after more prodding, muddy shoes, ant bites, and pants covered in dirt, we found it, and learned more valuable lessons for our future geocaching adventures - read the description and hints carefully, and your first interpretation of the hint (even if it appears blatantly obvious) is probably wrong.