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.