Geocaching (Pay Attention, I Say, Pay Attention)

I found what looked like an interesting geocache to do relatively close to my house. It was in a park, and today was such a beautiful day to be outside, enjoying the beautiful weather. This was a multi-cache, which meant you had to find something at the co-ordinates, which would lead you to the real cache. Unfortunately, I had forgotten my GPS PDA at home, so I ended up just printing it out, and never got around to downloading it into my GPS.

Luckily, the information provided was good enough to get us to the first "cache". It was a newly restored plaque in a cemetary, and by reading some numbers off it, we calculated the location of the actual cache very easily. The only problem was that the solution wasn't in co-ordinates, but distance and bearing from the current location. That's a problem because my GPS program doesn't know how to handle that (or if it did, I haven't figured out how yet). So we guessed where west was based on the location of the sun in the sky, and from there guessed where north would be, and got a general sense of the bearing. Based on the math, we had to go 243 metres from that location. Neither one of us had any idea what 243 metres felt like and for 10 or so minutes we guessed based on our stride.

Since the human foot is about a foot in length, and 3 feet is about a metre, I figured I would have to walk about 600 steps. That took us to a dead end before I had come close to 600 steps. Then I re-adjusted the calculation based on Anne's suggestion that a step is probably closer to a metre, but after walking about about two-thirds of what I needed, it was the same dead end.

Uh-oh. Walking in circles again, and again, and again. Finally, I gave up and called ptowferret, figuring that she would be in a better mood, as she was getting her new GPS. Luckily, she was just about to input the waypoints into her GPS, and she was more than happy (I hope) to use MapSource to calculate what the co-ordinates I needed to be at should be.

Then we semi-blindly stumbled around watching our location closely on the GPS to see how far away we were, and even that was frustrating because if I stayed in one place too long, the numbers stopped moving altogether until I started it up again. (In hindsight, if I had downloaded this cache into my GPS, I could have just added the new co-ordinates as a waypoint and used the compass function to tell me which way to go). We were finally on track, and it was taking us further off the beaten path than I had expected, and closer to the church that accompanies the cemetary than I had expected.

Then Anne coughed, "Ahem". I turned and looked at her, and she had that "get your head out of your butt" look on her face, as she tilted her head slightly towards a nearby tree. Apparently, my nose was so buried in my GPS that I had walked right by it! D'oh!

We posed the container with John near a nearby hole in the ground, put it all back and headed home. But first, KFC, because the best revenge for hearing Foghorn Leghorn in your head shouting, "Pay attention, son! I say, pay attention!" is to eat transfat free chicken.

Geocaching (Sometimes Three Heads are Better than Two)

May 1, 2007.

Encouraged by our previous finds, we decided to do more geocaching, and this time, we were going to do it with my co-worker, who goes by the geocacher handle of ptowferret. She's made several hundred finds since Nov 2006, and I was hoping to learn by osmosis. She had 3 or 4 caches in the downtown area left to do, and it fit perfectly into our plans.

Unfortunately for us, ptowferret was stuck at work until 5 pm. Anne and I took advantage of the time to look for some downtown caches that ptowferret had already found. I downloaded 3 and off we went. Our first was a real test because the co-ordinates led us in one direction, and the clues in the other. We gave up on it and easily got the next one, which was just reading some information off a historical plaque and building sign.

We went on to look for cache number 3, which was somewhere in the midst of lots of tall buildings, making the GPS signal bounce around, and basically useless for anything except to give us a general sense of where we should be. The problem is that there's a lot of hiding places near where we should be. We searched on one side of the street, and then the other, and then had to go pee. Then we searched on the island in the middle of the street. One of the clues was "Toronto, Antarctica" and we could find nothing nearby that had anything to do with Antarctica. Nothing. I found a flag of Toronto and lifted the base, asking Anne if she saw anything. "Nope."

So we gave up and started to head towards another cache. As we were walking away, Anne initiates the following conversation

Anne - Frank, what's Antarctica?
Frank - A continent?
Anne - What else?
Frank - An island?
Anne - The north pole.
Frank - You mean the south pole.
Anne - Whatever. Let's go back to the flag pole. It says here that the container is disguised, and something to do with a "peaNUT".

So, back we went. I lifted the base of the flag pole again and started touching all the nuts and bolts. Anne started kicking something and a nut came loose, or at least a nut-shaped container. I picked it up and unscrewed the magnetic lid. I pulled out the log and since it required small writing, I let Anne sign it. Then we both breathed a giant sigh of relief.

Since we had time left, we decided to go look for the one we gave up on earlier. The clue was to look for the crossroads of an educated monarch, and if we end up among the lions, we're at the wrong end. Well, we quickly saw where to lions were on University Ave, so we started heading away from them for Queen St, or maybe King St. However, something kept nagging at me. The clue also said that the map shows it too far south of it's actual location, but Queen was even further south, and King was south of that. I looked at the map again, and asked Anne, "What's this street we're at?" She didn't know, but it was Edward St, and Edward was also the name of a king. We looked around and was able to quickly find the cache, and film it with John the Geocaching Pig.

Now, we're headed north to meet ptowferret. We found the building easy enough, and ptowferret and I immediately wanted to find a computer to search for the cache, and kept running into issues with our search terms. My cell goes off and it's Anne. She's found the aisle that cache is in, no technology required. After that was an easy find. We signed the log book and headed out.

The three of us made a quick pitstop for dinner for that ptowferret would only get to see happy and excited Anne and Frank, as opposed to hungry, grumpy, and frustrated Anne and Frank (Frannek? Anfrankne?)

On our way to our next planned cache, both Anne and ptowferret mentioned that the "Gallows" cache had just been restored. ptowferret read from the printout she made (as her GPS had recently died, gone to the bit bucket in the sky, become signal-less, and not merely sleeping nor pining for the fjords), and said something about books and running water.

Somehow, Anne wasn't getting that geocaching is supposed to involve a GPS, as she remarked, "Oh, yeah, I know where those books are. That's where they used to hang people in Toronto", and off we go. Sure enough, we found it sans-GPS. I started climbing onto things, but in a few minutes ptowferret had announced that she had found it. She was gracious enough to allow us to see if we could find it, being the sensei that she is. We weren't patient students, so she took the cache out and signed the log for us. Then we posed it with John on a nearby bench.

Finally, we were going to do the geocaches that we had originally planned on doing with ptowferret. First stop was "Concrete Oasis". We decided to try it sans-GPS, and somehow ended up in Commerce Court. Anne commented on what a great view it was of the statues on the side of a nearby building, and ptowferret said that the baby elephants following the mommy elephant was very cute. So, we trekked on to the real location of the geocache, as sorta, semi, kinda confirmed by GPS. The location was indeed a beautiful oasis. Once there, we found the container quickly, and posed it with John on a nearby rock.

Our last location was one of ptowferret's nemesis, and she wanted us to look at the whole thing again with new eyes. That means no clues or suggestions to possibly bias us, but we came up with the same general location based on the clues. A few minutes into the searching process, ptowferret stood up, and had that look in her eyes, but apparently that was due to her hair getting in the way (or something to that effect). And then a few minutes after that, there was swearing as the container was found. We posed it as a new fashion accessory for John. Tight fit indeed.

BTW, I also learned that the Chicago song does not start, "Saturday in the park. I think it was the fourth of July." As this geocache was called, "I sat today, in the park".

So, with her nemesis finally conquered, we parted ways with ptowferret. As Anne and I walked towards our car, we stopped to sit on a ledge to drink some coffee from my thermos. It was then that we realized that we had walked over 4.5 hours today. Not only that, but we had missed Bon Jovi on America Idol, but that's what YouTube is for.

Oh, the next morning ... yeah ... ouch!