Wesley’s Personal Blog

This is part 8 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCM0DN was our final search on the day that started in Part 5. We had saved this one for last because, as a multicache, we were hoping it would be the best. It would cap off our so-far successful day.

On the way to the cache from the previous find, I stepped on a patch of ice that was covered in a light dusting of snow. I only mention it here because I recovered stunningly and was quite proud to not end up on my behind.

Anyway, on to the cache. We arrived at the first stage as the wind picked up, blowing across the nearby frozen lake, and seemingly through our clothes. We were well dressed for winter caching, but there comes a point where you just should not be outside. We were somewhere near that point.

The location was a bridge over a frozen stream. Unlike the last stream, this one had steep gravel sides that were not completely frozen. The gravel dislodged under foot and revealed sludgy, sloshy mud underneath. This, along with the blisteringly-cold wind, cut our efforts short.

The cache had a hint, and we decoded it with shivering hands that numbly held the pen to paper. It was obvious what the hint led to: A rock, possibly a hide-a-key.

We glanced down at the hundreds of rocks under and around the bridge, and decided to throw in the towel before it, too, was frozen solid.

On January 7th, I logged the following on Geocaching.com: Spent about 20 minutes in the snow looking for stage 1, then gave up and read the clue. It was far too cold, snowy, and muddy to actually check what the clue said, so we’ll have to return to this one in the spring or summer time.

2 weeks later, we decided spring was too far away. We returned to the site on a just-as-cold day and began our search anew. We very quickly found the rock, which led us to stage 2. Stage 2 was laughably easy, as was the third and final stage.

Success!

Next time, Team Retcon leaves the comfort (and cold) of home for our first out-of-state cache!

Wesley 81, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

This is part 7 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCHVNJ is the third dog-themed cache that our intrepid “Team Retcon” searched for on a cold winter day. The first two were unremarkable duds (You read about them) but this one was a surprising bit of fun. In Part 6, I detailed briefly a highly rated cache that failed to live up to its promise. Today, I’ll tell you of a lower rated cache that easily overstepped its rating.

We arrived at Silver Springs park in Stow, fresh from the park that held the previous two hides. We were bundled against the cold and steeled for a hunt. We were still fairly new to this activity but our confidence was rising with each successful find. We were not to be daunted!

We left the parking lot on foot and entered the woods, GPS pointing the way. It was quite a hike up a slowly rising hill, but eventually we reached ground zero. There were many potential hiding spots: Downed trees, stumps, and root systems near a small, frozen creek. We discounted the creek area because with a terrain of 1.5 you really should be able to simply walk to the cache and not clamber over, under, or into anything.

However, as each potential hidey-hole was eliminated we became increasingly aware that the creek was a really good source of hiding locations. We had just learned the lesson that sometimes people over-rate their caches, so perhaps this cache was under-rated. Luckily, being Winter the creek was not muddy or even wet. We began examining the banks, looking under roots and fallen logs.

No luck.

At some point, I decided to re-check the GPS. I had no reason to. Up to this point, it had at least been consistent if not 100% accurate. I was shocked to find that, while it had not 10 minutes before stubbornly pointed at a specific location, it was not just as stubbornly pointing almost 40 feet away, on the opposite side of the creek!

I figured that I’d give the little yellow bundle of electronics the benefit of the doubt, and followed it to the new ground zero. And there, hidden in plain sight exactly where the GPS led me, was the cache.

Next time, we have another Multi-cache and the first (but not the last by far) re-visit to a cache that we had failed to find the first time. See you then!

Wesley 81, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

This is part 6 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCK9HD is another cache in the secluded, wooded area in the Twinsburg/Hudson/Streetsboro area in Northeast Ohio that housed the cache I detailed in part 5 of this series.

Remember last time when I said the higher the difficulty rating, the more I enjoy the actual cache? Well, this cache is the exception to that rule. Difficulty 3 (2.5 too) caches are where things start to get fun. You start to find tricky multicaches with puzzles. You start to find unique hides and cleverly camouflaged containers (Oooh! Alliteration!). Speaking in a more general fashion: With higher numbered difficulty ratings you get more FUN.

Not so with this cache. It was a simple hide. An easy hide. I actually didn’t bother searching in the final hiding spot right away because I figured that was far too easy. Ironically, this made the cache a little harder to find than it should have been had it been rated correctly.

Could this be a meta-rating? I don’t give the hider that much credit. I just think the difficulty’s not set correctly. Don’t let that stop you, though. This park’s worth the hike and - when it all comes down to it - a cache is a cache.

I promise a better story next time, as I find a much easier rated cache with a much more difficult (and therefore fun) caching experience. See you next time!

Wesley 81, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

This is part 5 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCP3NP is a cache in a secluded, wooded area in the Twinsburg/Hudson/Streetsboro area in Northeast Ohio.

Sadly, while I remember the park (and would love to go back. I should make a point of it soon!) I do not remember the cache. The park - while small on the map - had quite a number of twisty trails that went up and down some impressively steep hills. There was a fireplace and chimney - all that was left of some hundreds-year-old house - and a creek that needed crossed. It was quite fun and - up to this point - my favorite “getting to the cache” experience. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s also tied with the hardest terrain I’ve searched in so far. I have found that - in general - the higher the terrain rating, the more I enjoy the hike. Likewise, you’ll soon see that (again in general) the higher the difficulty rating, the more I enjoy the actual cache.

But those are tales for other times. I said that some times these blog posts would be short, and this is one of those times. Stay tuned, though. As we clear out these lower rated caches we start our forays into more interesting territory. Things will only get better!

Wesley 81, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

This may surprise some people, especially those of you who listen to Volcanicast or follow my Twitters, but I’m a fairly private person. There are facets of my life that are fine to share, and there are facets of my life that I guard from the unwashed masses (That’s all of you). One of those guarded facets of my life is the exact nature of my personal relationships with some people. It’s fine for you to know that Bob is my friend, or that I’m dating Jenny, or that I am divorced. These are facts of my life that are fine to be public. I don’t hide them.

However, certain details ARE private. For example, it is NOT fine for you to know WHY I got divorced. It’s none of your business in the same way that dozens (or millions) of facts about your own life are none of my business. It’s private and personal and that’s it.

Some facets of my life aren’t exactly private, but I keep them as such because I don’t think anybody would particularly care about them or - if I kept on them with the fervor that I could - it would drive people away from me in droves. In particular, my exact feelings for Jenny are a secret because I’m not big on sappy public displays. I believe that strong personal feelings are just that: personal. If I know, and she knows, that’s enough.

This dichotomy of personal and public information seems to - on occasion - get me in trouble. I will say something, either on Twitter or on Volcanicast or in (gasp!) the real world that can be taken as some sort of confirmation of feelings. I have no problem voicing my opinion on a pretty woman we discuss on the show because of the fact that - when it all comes down to it - I don’t really have any feelings about her. She doesn’t matter to me and is immaterial, so the comment holds no emotional weight and is fine to be public. So, I make it public.

However, my feelings about Jenny DO have strong emotional feelings behind them, and so they are exactly the kind of thing I keep secret, both because I instinctively guard these kinds of things and because I know that nobody will actually care. Because of this, though, it could seem from the outside (Even the very near outside) that, while I love to ogle the celebrities I don’t actually give a shit about my girlfriend.

So let me set the record straight right now.

Jenny is my everything. She’s the one. She’s the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thing on my mind before I go to sleep. When we’re together I’m happy. When we’re not, I’m thinking about when we will be together. I lament the excessive time I spent living without her before we met, and look forward with glee to the decades we have yet to experience together. I adore her hazel eyes that glisten when she stares into mine. I love smelling her unruly hair when we hug in the morning. I love how she tucks her arms in when she’s cold and we hug. I love her butt. I love holding her in my arms and kissing. I love just sitting in the same room together when we’re each doing something solitary. I love her legs and her feet and the small of her back and that mischievous look in her eyes when she’s about to do something bad.

In short, I love HER. I was not aware what love was before we met. It’s as if - before - I was looking at a grainy photograph of love but am now experiencing it firsthand. I revel in it. I love it. I love being in love and I am in love with Jenny.

That felt good. Sorry for the interruption. Now back to your regularly scheduled internets.

Wesley Stuff

This is part 4 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCQMA3 was the final in a set of “easy” geocaches that we looked for on New Year’s eve in 2005. This one was a new type of cache for me, and one that I would come to love: A Multicache.

Multis are geocaches where the location you go to is not the location of the cache itself. Instead, it is the location of some sort of clue that will - perhaps after many steps - lead you to the cache. In this particular case (Hence the easy Difficulty rating of 1.5) it was a simple one-step cache.

We parked right next to the Cemetery Vault that gives this cache its name, and did the easy work involved in matching the various digits on the vault’s plaque to the simple puzzle on the piece of paper we had printed.

We hiked through the cemetery, being sure to remain appropriately civil, and reached our destination perhaps a half-mile from the vault.

It was then that I noticed that I had failed to write down one of the digits. Luckily, it was the least significant in the longitude - or East/West - coordinates.

It turns out that at my latitude, the difference between “0″ and “9″ in the least significant digit of longitude is about 20 feet. This 20-foot-wide line (when adding 20 feet or so for error) was actually the center of a 60-foot-long, 40-foot wide line that stretched from some graves, to over a short stone wall.

We decided that - instead of hiking back to get that one digit - we’d eschew civility and search the whole area. We looked at the grave stones (Wondering if someone would really hide a cache on or in one). We hopped the wall and looked in the bushes. We looked in a nearby tree.

I sadly do not - over 4 years later - remember who found the cache but it was eventually located inside the rock wall, wedged between two mossy stones. It was another micro and so held almost nothing. Still being new to this sport, I had yet to acquire my indifference to the “swag” that players put in each cache. I removed a “gold nugget” (a rock painted gold), replacing it with a penny (Hey, the cache was TINY). We placed the cache back into it’s hidey-hole and returned to the car and - I am guessing - went on to a fun night of New-Year’s Eve revelry.

Incidentally, I kept that gold nugget for quite some time. it adorned my computer’s keyboard, resting above the number pad for at least a year. It has since vanished but for some reason I was quite taken by it.

Next week, we’ll move on to another day of caching and my first unique deep-woods cache. Well… not deep-woods, but deeper-woods than any of the caches we’ve seen so far. See you then!

Wesley 81, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

This is part 3 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCRDG1 is among the easiest Geocaches out there: The ubiquitous 1/1. We hunted for - and found - this one right after the find I detailed last week (Part 2).

We parked the car in front of this little park that is scarcely more than a playground, and approached the large plastic playground equipment with confidence that this pesky little 1/1 would be an easy find. I mean, come on. Easiest terrain AND difficulty? No problem!

Lamenting momentarily the loss of the metal monstrosities we played on in our youths, we breezed past the plastic sectional play set and headed into the sparse wall of trees at the back of the park. These trees separated Sherwood Acres Park from a ball field. Perhaps in the summer they did their job fairly well; here in the deep midwinter they were more of a suggestion than an actual divider.

However, they posed a bit of a puzzle for our search. There were cracked trees. There were down trees. There were logs and rocks and all kinds of places a micro could be hidden. Yes, you heard me: I had learned from my prior experience and came to this cache knowing ahead of time that it was a micro.

We looked in the logs. We lifted the rocks. We checked around the roots of the larger trees and, as time went on, started to feel a sense of defeat. We considered our plight. It was a 1/1. It should be EASY. But this was not. We were still far too new at this game to say - with any authority - that we’d given it the effort due a 1/1 micro but… well… we felt that we had. By a factor of 5 or so.

There was a hint, though. Geocaching hints are simple ciphers of a type known as ROT13. To encode a ROT13 message, you ROTate the alphabet 13 letters. A’s become N’s. B’s become O’s. Etc. Because English has 26 letters, to decode the ROT13 message you simply ROTate it another 13 letters. Your N’s go back to being A’s, your O’s become B’s and everything falls into place.

I took the hint on the page and started decrypting. I felt like Ralphie with his Little Orphan Annie decoder as I frantically worked out each letter in turn.

I decoded the first three words: FIVE FEET UP.

I paused, looked up, and saw the cache hanging on a branch in front of me.

Next time, I’ll detail the third (and final) unique cache on this day - our first multi-cache!

Wesley 81, Games, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

We’re over halfway through Winter, which is good. But as usual I’m starting to get the blahs I always get from the lack of sunlight and never-above-freezing temperatures.
I miss…
…disc golf.
…unchapped lips.
…green things.
…driving with the windows down.
…birds.
…having my workday lunch outside with my girl.
…baseball.
…trying to record Volcanicast quickly so we can turn the air conditioning back on.
…getting home from work AFTER the sun rises.
…getting to work BEFORE the sun sets.
…having a nice breeze blow through the apartment.
…barbecues.
…camping.

Wesley Stuff

This is part 2 in an 81 part series entitled “81.” In this series, I am detailing my finds of 81 unique Terrain/Difficulty combinations of Geocaches. For a better explanation of exactly what I’m doing (Or to start the journey at the beginning) check out The first post in the series.

GCMC8B is another easy hide. It was my third find overall, but my second unique find. My second find just so happened to be a 2/1, just like the first. This one is a 2/2.

I was out in the Stow area showing some friends this new GPS I got, and introducing them to Geocaching. We parked near this bike trail and headed down the trail and - eventually - into the woods to find the cache.

We found the cache pretty quickly, and my friend expressed his concern that the many people wandering by on the bike trail would see us, wonder if we’re terrorists, call the police, or any of a number of other worries. I did not share his concern.

We replaced the cache after I dropped an oyster shell (From a beach in Washington State) into it, and we moved on to the next cache.

Maybe… just maybe… you’ll hear about that one next time.

Wesley 81, Games, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff

In my constantly frustrated effort to find something to blog about, I’ve come across an interesting (I hope) 81-part series that starts today, will sporadically jitter along for who-knows-how-long, and will eventually end at the 81st entry of the series. It takes some explaining to understand exactly what I’m talking about, so bear with me a bit as I go through this.

Geocaching is a fun outdoor activity that can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be. There are literally thousands upon thousands of geocaches in nearly every area of the US (There are 500 within about 10 miles from my apartment). If you like being outdoors AT ALL you should check the site out. All you need is a GPS (Check your cell phone. It may have the ability) and the desire to sometimes get muddy, wet, frozen, mosquito-bitten, and/or eyed suspiciously by “muggles” (the geocaching term for non-geocachers). The caches listed on the site are categorized with two main ratings: DIFFICULTY and TERRAIN. The first number gives you an idea of how hard the cache will be to find, while the second gives you an idea of how hard it is to reach. The numbers go from 1 to 5, in 0.5 increments. This means there are 9 values of each number.

After geocaching for a while, I stumbled upon a site named It’s Not About The Numbers that - despite its name - gives you a whole bunch of statistical information about the caches you have found. Included in that information is a nice little 9×9 grid that shows you which of the 81 combinations of difficulty/terrain you have found, and those that you have not.

So I got an idea: Why not find at least one of every combination? I’m in the 20’s right now (I found the 27th unique one - making my journey 1/3 of the way done - in February of 2010) so I’ve got a good way to go. Maybe, I thought, if I blogged about them I’d have a reason to go for the more rare (and/or the more difficult) combinations.

Sometimes these posts will be long (Like this one) and sometimes they’ll be short. Sometimes the hunt will be difficult, and sometimes easy. But all in all I hope it’ll be an interesting journey.

So let’s get started.

(Oh, I should say: These posts are essentially spoilers for the caches. So unless you don’t think you’ll ever look for them, you may not want to actually read these)

GCQ0F3 is an easy (Difficulty 2, Terrain 1) hide in the Solon Industrial area. It was not just my first find in the 81 list, it was my first find ever. It happened to be near the building I worked in, back when I found it in 2005. I had just gotten my GPS that day, and had brought it with me to work. I checked out geocaching.com and was excited to find that there was a cache JUST DOWN THE ROAD. Within walking distance, even. I work nights, so I threw on a coat and headed out into the cold late-November-evening air to nab my first find. It was, according to my GPS, in a little grove of 3 trees in the center of a roundabout at the end of the road. Not exactly well-hidden, it would have been impossible to search stealthily during the day. I looked on the ground. I looked at the bases of the trees. I looked in the branches. I realized how much a flashlight would help.

After 20 minutes, I returned to work angry and frustrated. There was NOTHING there. I decided to cheat a little, and read other logs. “Great hide!” I read, and snorted. “Quick Cache,” another member mockingly tittered. “WAY COOL MICRO!!!” another shouted. Micro? What’s a micro?

It turns out that a Micro is the smallest type of cache. The biggest micros are those little plastic containers that hold film (You remember film, right?) and the smallest ones are smaller than thimbles.

Armed with this knowledge, plus the knowledge that someone found it *three* days ago so it was likely still there, I went back out on my next break with newfound determination. I expanded my search to a nearby plaque, the curb around the roundabout, and even considered the trees outside the roundabout. However, my GPS told me that its accuracy was under 30 feet. 30 feet meant within the roundabout.

I again returned to work cacheless. This sport, I thought, appears to be a bit more difficult than I expected it to be. Was my $120 purchase actually worth it after all?

Eventually my work shift ended. I was getting in my car, preparing to take the long (okay, short. But drives of shame have to be long) drive home, and suddenly I realized that if I did not find this cache I would have FAILED. 100% of my searches so far would have been FAILURES. This was unacceptable. I drove down the street to the little grove of trees and defiantly stormed into them, ready to spend all night there if need-be.

And suddenly I found it. With a branch poking me in the face, and another scraping my ungloved and frozen hand, I wormed my way deep into the trees to what I had thought was a bird’s nest. But this was no bird’s nest; It was a WICKER BASKET. A tiny, bowl-shaped wicker basket with a Carmex lip-balm container in it.

Like Gollum with his precious, I scurried to my car with the container and unscrewed it with frozen fingers. Within, I found a tiny rolled up piece of paper with scribbled names and dates. I fished a pen from my glove box (Incidentally, always bring a pen when you go geocaching. I ALWAYS forget to do this), happily scribbled my name and the date on the paper, and returned the container to its original location.

I had succeeded, and was done with my first step on my as-yet-undiscovered journey through 81 caches.

Wesley 81, Games, Geocaching, Outdoors, Stuff