As Phillip and I left our apartment for the only time yesterday, to pick up something he’d left at his office, Phillip remarked that we haven’t been doing much caching lately. (I don’t remember what brought the subject up.) I was quick to disagree. I replied that we’ve been doing a lot of geocaching – it’s just been that we haven’t been doing much caching that wasn’t a part of the King County Thomas Guide Challenge.
The Challenge has taken over our geocaching efforts – more than I initially thought it would when we started it. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s merely changed our style of geocaching. As I pointed out to Phillip yesterday, we haven’t been Finding a large number of geocaches, compared to what we once did – only 3 to 5 per weekend. But we’re spending 3 to 5 hours Finding them.
Before the Challenge, we would pick out a part of town – or a town – and make up a list of clustered geocaches in the area. Now, we’re logging Finds several miles apart from each other to get those pages. As we cover the limits of King County, we’re spending as much time (or maybe more time) in the car as we are out of it.
When we jumped into the Challenge, I was most worried about page 479 – the northeast corner of the county. There was a micro in the middle of nowhere, a geocache requiring a boat, and nothing else. But we Found the micro, and the drive wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. Besides, we’d been in the general area several times.
Now my focus of concern is page 779 – along the southeast corner of the county. There is a 1/2 small cache at the edge of a lake a couple of miles from the nearest town, a 5/3.5 puzzle cache of unknown size (and an unknown location, since I haven’t solved the puzzle), and nothing else. (5/3.5 means 5 out of 5 difficulty and 3.5 out of 5 terrain.) I’m pretty sure we’ve never been out there.
The 1/2 small has been confirmed missing for a couple of months. It was last Found in May. The cache owner hasn’t responded to the cache’s maintenance, and yesterday, a geocacher posted a note suggesting that the cache be archived. And that will leave page 779 with only one geocache – a geocache that is pretty much out of our reach.
Maybe someone will hide another cache on the page. Maybe we’ll have to. (If we do, the rules say it’ll count for us on the Challenge.) I was looking at the map this evening. Besides that lake, there’s half a state park, a county cemetery, a small town, and many miles of blank space.
Someday, we’ll have Finds in all 80 pages, and we’ll go back to our old geocaching style.
