Woohoo – First To Find!!

So today has been an awesome day. I started the day off by prepping my first three geocaches to be placed in the wild. I went to the hardware store and got magnets, green paint and pvc pipe. I already had 2 fake sprinkler heads (thanks mom & dad!) and a wall outlet faceplate cover with all the cache logsheets printed out and waiting. Once I got home I cut a slit into the pvc pipes so the fake sprinkler heads would fit snugly inside. (You have to use the pvc pipe so the fake sprinler head stays securely in the ground with so many people opening it up.) Then I hot glued the magnets and screw heads to the face plate cover and spray painted it. I was about ready to hit the road and place the sprinkler caches when the “New Caches” email popped up in my inbox.

Somebody had just publised a regular sized cache (those are rare in the city) and loaded it up with awesome swag. My goal was the unactivated geocoin  FTF (First To Find) prize. Now the FTF on its own is a cool reward, but an actual geocoin that I could own? That would be SWEET so we hit the road right away. It was only 3.5 miles away so we were there pretty quickly.

Of course, as is ever so often the case with geocaching, we ended up in a place we had no idea that even existed. It’s called Oak Park in New Tampa and it is beautiful. TONS of oak trees way up in the sky spanning over you as you walk through. All you hear is the wind blowing through the trees. But I wasn’t in there to take a stroll, I had a cache to find so I ran down the path till I got close to the cache. I still wasn’t sure if I had been quick enough to get there before anybody else, so I left the trail and hurried through the woods trying to get closer to the cache. There were tons of palmetto bushes, not too thick though, so just a couple minutes off the trail and I was right on top of the cache.

Once I got to Ground Zero I put the GPS down and started looking around. 10 minutes went by and I still hadn’t found it. I was getting frustrated cuz it was hot and muggy out today. I kept looking all around the area, a 50 foot span across and still hadn’t found it. So I walked back to where I had rested my GPS on a tree, contemplated leaving, but didn’t want to give up on the FTF. And then I looked up. THERE it was, tied to the very tree I put my GPS on! Except it was 15 feet up in the tree! I had to climb the tree to get to the box. And since it was tied up there (and I don’t know how to retie knots) I had to leave it there while I opened it. You should have seen me, straddling this huge tree trunk and trying not to fall to my death, all the while gawking over the prizes that were inside the cache. It was filled with some awesome stuff, much better than the crap you normally find. But best of all, the geocoin was still there! I was the First To Find! WOOHOO!!

I did my best to take pictures of the experience and preserve my own life at the same time, so I apologize if the photos are a bit blurry. (I forgot my camera so I had to take them all with my crappy cell phone.) After I closed the cache back up, we continued on planting the three caches I had prepped earlier in the morning.

The first sprinkler hide was tough since the ground was so hard, (and I don’t know where my hammer is.) It’s placed near the new Red Robin restaurant at Wiregrass. Holly came up with the name for it: “…Yummm!” We did the best we could with a spade and eventually got it down in the ground enough to blend in with the environment. The second sprinkler hide was much easier due to softer ground. It went right down and blended in perfectly with its surroundings. I couldn’t think of a good name for it, so of course Holly had the bright idea to call it “Basked of Birds”. (It was close to a Baskin Robins.) The final hide was a copy of the best “WHOAH, AWESOME!” moment I’ve ever had geocaching: the fake face plate magnet on an electrical box. This box is right across the street from where I live, so I can check on it whenever I need to. The electrical components are all painted green so I called it “The Green Monster”.

All in all it’s been an awesome day. Thanks to my beautiful wife for coming with me today, helping me with the cache names, and making me look, “you know, not so creepy” while I’m planting these caches with people wondering what I’m up to. It really does help to have a girl with you, otherwise you’re just this weird dude digging holes in the ground with a pipe bomb in your hand. So without further ado, photos for you all to enjoy!