Skip to main content

Geocaching and Hidden Creatures pt 2

Good morning everyone.  This week's fun fact has the potential to being another blog down the road.  It's all about my FTFs (First to Finds).  From March 14, 2014 to June 4, 2018 I have a total of 15 FTFs.  From July 16, 2018 to August 11. 2018 I have added 12 more FTFs to my list, for a total of 27.  Not sure if it's something I ate, drank, something in the air, but I've become a FTF hound.  **I had to edit this as I got two more after this was typed, and went for one more this morning that I had solved at 1:30am.  I should have went at 1:30am.  I missed out on that one.**

This week I continue with my adventure with Hakliva and her vlog is also the continuation as she captured it.  We accomplished what we wanted to do for the Saturday, set up camp, and turned in for the evening.  Sunday was a new set of goals.  There are a bunch of challenge caches that I wanted to get (I love challenge caches) and Hakliva wanted to do a series of field puzzle caches.  The challenge caches are put out by local cacher Awol, and the challenge is connected to the attributes.  You needed to have found 1,000 caches that have the "Dog" attribute, 40 caches with the "Field Puzzle" attribute, and so on.  There are seventeen of these "Victory Trail" caches.  We would be finding these, along with the "Riddle Me This" series (I'll explain these in a bit), along with other caches in our travels.

First things first, we (or should I say me) need to wake up to get the day going.  I find as I get older, I'm becoming less and less of a morning person.  The only time I don't mind getting up at the crack of dawn is in the Winter when the sun rises after 8am.  When I did get up, I discover that Hakliva had been up for awhile, went for a run, been down to the beach, and whatever else an early morning riser does.  I still needed to eat and shower.  With that done and camp all packed up, we were ready to find more caches.

First up is a "Riddle Me This" cache.  There are ten caches in this series put out by local cacher JAB007.  Inside the container is a cryptex cylinder with a riddle attached to it.  You had to solve the riddle, dial in the answer on the cryptex, and if you're right, it unlocked the log sheet.  First riddle was 'What did the dad buffalo say to his son on his first day of school?'  I knew the answer to this one.  Some of the other riddles had me stumped.  All of these cryptex cylinders are hand made, so a lot of time and effort went in to making these quality caches that are worthy of many favourite points.  If you haven't done them yet, I highly recommend that you do.

I find it amusing that when you plan a geocaching outing and unknown to you, another geocacher has the same plans and one is following the other.  That was the case today as we did another Riddle Me cache and saw it was found that morning by local cachers 4elements5senses and ruylopez.  A quick message to them to let them know we are hot on their heels.  LOL.  We never did meet up with each other.

(you never know when you will need to 'Phone a Friend' for help)

As we travel these back roads South of Morden, the area seemed very familiar to me.  A check on the geocaching app confirmed that the third oldest active cache in Manitoba (Washed Road Cache GC10F1) is down the same road we need to go down.  I have found this one a couple of years ago, but Hakliva hasn't.  Add that to the list of caches we'll be stopping for.

(Hakliva at GZ for Washed Road)
(The view from GZ at Washed Road)


Another of the Riddle Me caches that we stopped at has the riddle, "What do you call a fish with no eye?".  I got this one and was saying the answer, but Hakliva wasn't paying attention to me.  Finally I cued up the answer on the cryptex and pulled out the log sheet.  Watching the video replay of this one, you can see Hakliva not paying any attention to me as I was saying the answer until she saw the cryptex.  Her reaction was priceless.  I still bug her about that to this day.  Getting slightly off topic; On another adventure we would have two weeks later, she had a bag of fish crackers.  When she shared some with me, I was pointing out that these fish have eyes.
(We found other, really good caches in our travels on this day)

  By early afternoon, we had found all the challenge caches and Riddle Me caches.  Now we're going after random caches in Morden.  It was another hot day out and we were now running into DNFs.  Some of the DNFs, we believe are missing.  One in fact I had found a couple of years ago and I couldn't find it.  Another had us going squirrely, so we moved on.  Soon we found ourselves in the neighbouring city of Winkler.  I have a few DNFs here and it would have been nice to avenge these blue faces on my geocaching map.  With Hakliva along (an extra set of eyes), maybe she'll see something I missed.  The first one of those was a TB hotel.  I've been to this one a couple of times with no luck.  Hakliva found it quickly while I did the palm to forehead "DOH!!".

We added a new DNF to our list.  This one is owned by Awol.  We contacted a previous finder and we were convinced that it was missing.  I couldn't resist putting in my log that we think this cache has gone....Awol.  I haven't spoken to Awol since so I don't know if he got a chuckle from that.  On to avenge another DNF.
I was doing my best Batman, trying to think this one out before flying into action.  Sadly, this cache has alluded me once again.  Beaten by the heat, tired and hungry, we went for something to eat after this, then onwards to home.  

That concludes the weekend adventure, but it's not the last Hidden Creature adventure.  Hopefully I'll be able to fit all the other adventures into next week's blog.  Here is the link to Hakliva's video: https://youtu.be/-_mHimYkIpI  It'll be ready for viewing after 11:30am local time.  Until then, be safe, peace out, enjoy, and have fun.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Geocaching and July, 2022

Good morning everyone.  Last month I was a little late in getting that month's blog published, but this month I want to get this out early.  I'll explain why later. July has been an interesting month.  I've been on a few adventures, rode my bike, and I've been hosting a weekly themed event. July started off with Auntie Mo and myself going on a spur of the moment road trip into the Southeast portion of Manitoba to do an Adventure Lab that takes us to some roadside attractions.  There was other ALs to do as well. (big Buffalo in Grunthal, Manitoba) (big deer in Saint Malo, Manitoba) Later in the month, I tagged along with Auntie Mo as she did the four Adventure Labs in the East part of Winnipeg.  I had done them already, but I couldn't resist giving Auntie Mo a tour of Transcona.  This also helped set her up to be close enough to claim her 800th find while she visits family back home in Nova Scotia.  As I write this, she has reached that milest

Geocaching and Patreon

Good morning everyone.  Almost 10 months is completed for the year 2019.  Where has the time gone?  Who has found the most geocaches so far?  In Canada, it's Troqueurs32 with 10,423 finds.  That's almost ten thousand more than me.  Down in the U.S., mondou2 has found 16,743 geocaches.  Locally, 4elements5senses has logged 2,169 finds so far among Manitoba based geocachers.  Tick_Magnet is the top North Dakotan with 2,004. If you follow any of the Geocaching YouTubers (vloggers), podcasters, or bloggers, you may have heard some talking about and thanking their Patreon subscribers.  What exactly is this Patreon that these people are talking about?  Hopefully this week's blog will help you understand the background and connection that these geocaching artists have with Patreon.  Helping me out with this project are two people that I subscribe to.  GeoJangie and Cache the Line, both of whom are Patreon creators. First, a little background history.  Patreon was co-founded by

Geocaching and SM66

Good morning everyone.  This week's fun fact should be a favorite.  The Canadian geocacher who has collected the most favorite points on all their caches is Tupper T. Turtle with 8,314.  The top American geocacher is WV Tim with a whopping 23,587 points. You're probably wondering who or what an SM66 is.  SM66 is a casual geocacher, a full time nurse, a full time single mom, and my girlfriend.  She knew of geocaching before I had met her, had an account, but never had a chance to find a geocache.  So I can't take credit for introducing her to this hobby.  My tales of travel, adventures and my dedication to a daily streak interested her (or she thought I was crazy) and we made plans for SM66 to experience what geocaching is all about. We decided on a day trip to Hecla Provincial Park.  This was in September of 2016.  I had never been to Hecla and neither had SM66.  We set off early with a minimum of a two hour drive ahead of us.  We arrived at our first cache location, &q