Lately, it feels like all of our date nights are on the rocks. Or on the rock piles at least.
We've been spending a lot of time geocaching lately. And it's pretty amazing how many ways there are to turn a rock into a geocache.
Dan has made a few of the real rock caches - rocks he drilled holes into to insert bison tubes into them. He bought two drill bits - a pricey diamond encrusted one ($20) and a regular mason bit ($3.50). The diamond one did not work well. The $3.50 one has been great. Go figure. A 5/8 bit works well for a half inch bison tube.
My least favorites are the "needle in a haystack" caches. A rock, in a pile of rocks. These are a couple of my logs from one needle in a haystack rock cache near us:
Didn't find it 04/02/2016
Day #683. Spent another evening skulking behind a convenience store sorting through trash strewn rocks. The container continues to elude us. Our children believe we've gone mad. We may have. Gave up the search at dusk, but am certain we'll be drawn back by a force we cannot withstand.
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Didn't find it 04/15/2016
Day #710. Some basic research & mathematical calculations confirmed that at our age, having us committed to a psychiatric facility would cost more than our children will benefit from their inheritance.
With that fact settled, we set out to dig through more rocks, determined today would be the day to get this off our list!
But we forgot to calculate in my attention span. About 40 rocks later, I got bored. That might actually be progress for me.
I'm now contemplating a rock flipping citgo event.
We will return....
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We probably visited this cache 6 or 7 times. We used three different apps on two different cell phones, AND a handheld gps unit. All put us in the same basic location every single time.
Finally another cacher, after reading my logs, sent me a hint. We stopped by and found the cache "in minutes" just as others had posted, leading me to believe that the others had the same type of hint we received. I don't think we would have ever found it without basically being told where it was - it was too far away from where our gps units were directing us.
But not all rock geocaches are a needle in a haystack type. Some are just rock containers. You can buy a fake rock cache - a hide a key shaped like a rock. Or make one out of cement. Or use a drill bit to put a bison tube in a real rock. You can even make a fake rock out of expand a foam, with a little bit of paint to make it blend in.
Below are some of the different rock cache hides we have found. Some were a lot of fun. Some, like the one above, I had more fun logging DNF's for than I did looking for.
It's hard to explain to friends why we sort through piles of rocks, or search guard rails, or look under lamp post skirts.. it's like the dirty secret of geocaching. We'd rather tell them about the caches that take us to cool overlooks, historic sites, or caches that are puzzles or gadgets. But we still search through piles of rocks, guardrails, and lamp post skirts. Why? I really don't know. We always think it's not about the numbers for us, but we keep going to find these, rather than ignoring this type of cache. While we prefer the unique, the scenic, the historical.. the fact is,when we head out to cache, we usually go after every cache in the area, no matter what it is. It's all part of the game I guess. :-)
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