Newest Milestone!

As we have been caching now since Sept 2010, we have had to space out our finds to make it to 100. With my Fibro flaring up really bad in the winter, I can't cache as much as I would like to when it gets cold. The weather has been so beautiful this past week however, we were actually able to do a massive cache run!

So as we said in our last post, we hit 100 the 31st of January. Well, yesterday we hit hit 200!! That is 100 caches in 19 days! We couldn't have done it without the amazing warm weather that pushed in and then yesterday was a great event!

Yesterdays event at Beaver Dam Lake in Gloucester, Va was so much fun! We met some more amazing cachers and had a great lunch and even won some door prizes, how can you beat that? Well, afterwards, we decided to team up some other great cachers and do a team cache run through the park! It was one of the most fun excursions we have been on. Being with a group was a new experience for us, as we have only teamed up with 1 other cacher and that was my best friend as I sucked her into the sport! This time we were with about 9 other cachers (both adults and little bits) and it was such great fun! We are so blessed to have met such great people and to be a part of this community.

This is definitely an addictive sport but I have to admit, with all the trails we have hit the past couple of days, I can feel the muscle in my legs starting to get back in shape! So now as we turn from one milestone to a new one, we can begin to set a goal... Get out as much as we can now that the weather is breaking, well except for Sundays as that is NASCAR day!! Now I have a new reason to keep going to races, now I snag, bag and tag the caches at the tracks!!

~Kesara~

100 Milestone

Well, it is official, we have finally hit the 100 milestone marker!!!!

After snagging a few caches here and there over the winter holidays, it has just been to cold for me personally, (I have Fibro and cold weather just kills me and makes the pain worse) to be able to go out and do more than a park and grab here and there.

Yesterday, as a family day, we all went over to Norfolk and with my family we all kinda drove around and snagged a few quickies in the area before coming back home to our side of the water. We noticed that we were extremely close to the 100 goal so we just snagged a couple easy ones and made the marker a special puzzle cache that we had been working on for a while.

Our 100th find was a memento for ibwacko as he and his family will be leaving us for warmer weather and a new job. So it was only fitting that we found Mind Games for our 100th find.

So now, it is off on another adventure for another milestone and here's to warmer weather, great friends and wishes for a new venture for a wonderful guy and his family!

Quick Grabs

Now that the weather is getting cold now, I get less chance to go on longer caching hunts and the hikes that go with them. Since we had to go to the store anyway, we decided to grab a couple of park and grabs in the area of the store. Well, that 1 stop turned into 3 stops, 2 caches and getting my mom involved...

First off, we actually did get to the store that we went out for. (It would have been a bit awkward if we forgot that) We decided that we would go ahead and snag a quick cache in the parking lot of the store next to the one we just came out of. Well, after we logged that, we shopped around there, buying some cool holiday stuff.

As we were then heading home, we decided to snag the one that is behind a Home Depot. (As if we needed another excuse to check out stuff in there too) We drove around to the back and this time my mom got out to help look. Of course, I should have probably stayed back and let my mom actually find this one, since it has become apparent that I have a "sixth sense" when it comes to locating caches. I though I would just poke around the location and "hopefully" let my mom be the finder, just to spark her interest in our new hobby. Well, I should probably have stayed in the car then... I walked right up to it and with one single motion found the dang thing. I swear, within less than 5 seconds...

So now I get the label of *human GPS* and my mom can still grumble that I won't let her find one. I guess this means that we all get to go out and find some more caches together. I think she will get the bug, as long as I let someone else have some fun once in a while...

Since we are so close to our 100th find, I would really love to be able to snag that accomplishment before the end of the year.

Caching With A Friend

One of the best things that one can do is introduce another person to the joys of caching. Well, we got to do just that with a great friend.

JuliaDarling, whom I have known for years, decided to join us on a caching adventure. We decided to try something that would be fun and a little easier than some of the higher difficulty caches that leave you wanting to pull your hair out. So our first stop was a local petting zoo, Blue Bird Gap Farm. There were a couple of traditional caches and a puzzle cache there, so perfect place to start.

Well, we immediately found ourselves thick in with briars and generally painful thorns. After walking around in circles we decided to go on a hunch that Julia had from what she remembered from the description of the cache and low and behold grown zero!

The next cache was creepily near a small cemetery that I honestly never knew was even in the park and was a quick find. However, the puzzle cache that we were working on finding all the answers to as we went, proved to be a little more difficult... As in Brody figured out the correct coordinates as we were driving out of the parking lot! Nice, right? So we chose to hit that one at another time, we were NOT going to turn back.

Gathering a few more finds at another local park, we officially determined that we had made a convert as well as a caching partner. This will benefit all of us since we just had a blast being out there with her.

As the weather is turning cold, the amount of caches that we hit will probably be more sporadic but we know one thing... No matter what season, as long as we have a great friend with us, we are sure to have fun and maybe even cause a ruckus. After all, isn't that what friends are for?

With everything going on in the geocaching community on 10/10/10, we had a handful of really cool event options this past weekend. We were lucky enough to be close to an event that garnered some ink on Latitude 47, Groundspeak’s official blog. A couple of our local cachers, Lord Vader of the MiniMartinWarriors and NozyRN decided to make an event cache out of their wedding ceremony, and invited anyone with a GPS to come join in the festivities. We drove across town to one of the prettiest parks we've ever seen in Norfolk, and met plenty of folks who, to that point, were just entries in a logbook. Not having any idea what kind of ceremony we were in for, it was quite by accident that we ended up more or less front and center for the ceremony. Suffice it to say, the last thing we expected was a bride in jeans, and a groom with a tuxedo t-shirt and lightsaber.



At 10:10 and ten seconds, on 10/10/10, the ceremony got underway, including swearing from the bride (Yeah, we caught that Nozy...), releasing fish into the park's koi pond, and a "you may kiss the bride" that lasted longer than anyone could keep track of. Afterward, there was a who's-who of Hampton Roads geocachers, to include the man responsible for our first DNF, ibwacko. Turns out, for the sheer evil he's capable of with cache placement, he's actually a very nice guy.

After the ceremony, we were in for a bit of a surprise at the travel bug table. On our recent trip to North Carolina, we picked up a travel bug in the form of an alligator. Earlier in the week, we went caching in Huntington park, and left the little guy under a log in a little patch of swamp, which was perfect for out little gator. Imagine our surprise when we came across him, fresh from his swampy abode, waving hello from the table.



We decided to pass on an event out in Virgina Beach later that day, and came back to our side of the water, where we spent the rest of the day caching. Among the many finds logged that day was a cache that required fishing line and had no log inside, a quiet stroll through a beautiful part of town, and 2 puzzle caches, the first of which required knowing binary. The second, encrypted in morse code, was probably the toughest find so far. Lesson learned that day: a 4.0 terrain is NOT to be taken lightly.



All in all, we were honored to be able to share an amazing day with some great people, and devote an entire day to what's become an awesome hobby.

~Brody

We decided, mostly on a whim, to branch out a bit and do a geocaching road trip. Up to this point, the furthest cache we had found was no more than a ten minute drive from the house. We grabbed our supplies, loaded the cooler, and hit the road to go south of the border. Okay, okay, so we went south of the Virginia/North Carolina border, but it was still an adventure.

This wasn't exactly our first trip to the Outer Banks, so we've come to follow a bit of a routine when making the trip. We stopped, as usual, at the Border station, a gas station and gift shop that straddles the border. We came across a micro with about 5 feet of Virginia left, then crossed the border for a couple of firsts. We've come across plenty of micros, but this one was our first bison tube. This also made our first find in another state.



A few miles down the road, we decided to detour for a spell. We had seen that there was a travel bug hotel about a mile off the main road. Having never found one before, we thought it would be a worthwhile trip. What we found was an ammo can on steroids, complete with what we thought was a really cool idea for cache swag. We found a disposable camera with 9 photos left. Well, 8 now. We snapped a picture of the two of us with the monster cache, and placed it back in. We traded geocoins, and were promptly on our way.

The ultimate purpose of this trip was for, of all things, a travel bug. If you've been following from the beginning, you've seen the TB that came all the way from Hagenhill, Germany. We thought that if it wanted to see some beautiful places, Cape Hatteras was a great place to take it. We discovered a webcam cache, and added that to our experience before heading back.



We thought it would be only fitting that we dropped the travel bug in North Carolina instead of bringing it all the way back home. On the way back, we booted up the GPS and decided to try to find little Hagenhill a fitting home. We found what we thought would be a decent spot, and trekked a little off the beaten path. Even before getting out of the car, the mosquitoes were swarming through the windows.Poor Kesara made a whopping 30 feet before deciding this would be a good time for me to sharpen my caching skills and find this one solo. After the fastest log signing in history, a mad dash, and half a gallon of blood loss later, we decided to find a better home for him. Our next three decisions all turned out to be caches that were DEFINITELY not made for night caching, so we ultimately decided to pay another visit to the travel bug hotel we hit earlier today for a quick little drop-off.

We've been coming to find more and more that one of our favorite things about geocaching is the thrill that comes with going to a place that you may have been a dozen times before, and finding these amazing little places you didn't even know existed.We can't tell you how many times we've been to the outer banks and driven right past some amazing places, simply because we had no idea they were there. That won't be the case anymore...

~Brody

When asked what she would like to do on her birthday, it was really no surprise Kesara said that she wanted to go caching. We grabbed our usual supplies and hit the road. Our first find of the day parked us in a quaint little church, then sent us immediately bushwhacking. A short hike, some greenbriars, and a very close encounter with a spider that Kesara swears up and down was day-glow yellow, we made our first find of the day.



We made a quick pit stop at a local playground for a quick micro grab, then made our way down the road to what turned out to be a really cool cache. We made a trek into a little patch of forest by a nearby shopping center, and came across a treehouse built in the middle of it. Of course, we both thought "Wow, what an awesome place for a cache!" Turns out, though, that we may have to place one there, because the cache we set out for was sneaky enough to make us blaze right past it on our way to what we thought was obviously the place for it... When we did eventually find it, we found a travel bug that started all the way in Hagenhill, Germany. This little bug is trying to see as many pretty places as possible, and we had an upcoming trip that sounded perfect for him. More about that in a few posts.

We managed to log our very first Virtual Cache on this trip as well. Being a native of the area, Kesara had been to this spot dozens of times in the past. Headed back, we hit a micro along the way. We parked and I jumped out to grab it. Perhaps I was a touch too excited to find a micro that was something besides a nano or hidden under a lightpole skirt, because upon re-entering the car, I proceeded to hit my ear on the car door and pinball the other side of my head into the door frame. Once Kesara stopped giggling long enough to get something for my now throbbing noggin, we set out for the last find of the day.



Fighting through a headache to play navigator to one more find, we pulled off the main road to hit a themed cache. After a simple enough hunt, we tracked down the "public safety" cache, and traded out a traffic cop playschool toy for a piece of crime scene equipment. (Okay, so it was a ruler, but it was a really snazzy one...) Not a bad way to celebrate another year.

~Brody