It all started on a kind of gloomy Sunday day in May. May 15, 2016 to be exact.
The plan?
To go geocaching
So, John shows up at my place and I ask him where he wanted to go and look for geocaches and he suggests a nearby park because we hadn’t been there yet. I pull it up on my old phone (which isn’t connected to a data plan) and he immediately decides we should try the red dot cache. So we look into it at my place and that cache is supposed to lead us to other caches… something we had never tried before so why not?
So we (I) find the cache in the park and inside is this clue:
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| Clue #1 |
We usually bring a stamp to stamp the log book but had forgotten it this time. Sometimes there are tradeable items inside the cache container and in this one was a lego man (not the first time we have found one so I just quickly give it to John without thinking and we leave one of our army men in its place. Because we had forgotten to bring our stamp and we didn’t have a pen to sign the log I never even looked at it… BUT… there was a clue as to what we happening on the log… that I never even saw.
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| Do you see the clue in the log? |
Based on the clue I knew it would be by the boat docks and I pulled up the geocache map on my old phone. There was a dot there so we headed towards that dot. However, once we got there my gps on my phone started to act up and it thought we were on the wrong side of the river. I was kind of discouraged because this would make it harder to find the next cache. BUT, I told John I would restart my phone and hopefully that would help. Meanwhile, he told me it was probably where someone would sit to watch the boats based on the clue and we should see If there are places to sit around the actual dock (because I had led us into the trees already). So we head over that way and my phone comes back on. Remember how I told you my phone isn’t connected to data? Well, I guess because we always load the geocache map while at my place all those geocache dots show up and stay there… but now that I had restarted the phone (and the app) they had all disappeared. I didn’t bring my actual phone and we were at the park (so no wifi) so we were left without the dots (but a correctly functioning gps). Now I really thought we were sunk. But, John found the second one quite quickly… maybe because he had placed them all.
No log in this one.. just the clue which read:
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| Clue #2 |
I knew right away it was by the duck pond and I knew there was a little hill behind it. So we headed there. John insisted that it could also be by some of the rock piles around the pond so he made us check half of those before we got to the hill. Honestly, we would have never found the geocache in that area without the help of my phone… but John insisted that it could still be by a rock pile. So we went to check the last ones… and this is what we found.
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| Clue #3 |
By this point I had started questioning some things... All the containers looked brand new. None of them were labeled as an official geocache, and that one by the duck pond was so close in the water at different times of the year it would likely be under the water... just seemed like a dumb place to put one if you ask me.
Anyways, I knew there was play structures at this park so we headed in that direction because it seemed like the right place to find it. John found this one, I later found out he found it because he had never actually left it there (with children playing on the structure all day long it likely would have gotten found and moved... multiple times). But I definitely didn't catch on to this.
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| Clue #4 |
I knew this one would lead us back to the shelter by the duck pond and when we got closer there were some bushes in the fork in the road so we knew it was in there. The only problem was that there were also a bunch of kids playing in there.
I quickly spotted that the container was on the ground (but still in the tree/bush area) so we just patiently waited for the kids to leave the area. The only problem was that they weren't. They did find the clue however and showed it to everyone in the tree. Eventually we left sitting right in front of that spot and wandered more towards the pond (but still within sight of the tree) about 30-45 minutes later the kids were finally leaving the tree so we headed back over there. But there was a new problem. One of the little kids had the container in his hand and then... he stuck it in his pocket! John was pretty insistent that we should find out how it ends because we had come so far and luckily for us... just when we thought we wouldn't get the final container back the boy through it under the tree and left.
So John retrieved it and we quickly got out of there before the boy realized we had taken the container he had grown so fond of.
This was the clue in the final container:
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| Clue #5 |
And well, I guess while I read it John got down on one knee and the rest is history as they say.
While we were finding all the geocaches John was collecting all of them so that I would have them all (I also never noticed this)... so here they are in all their glory.
Oh and if you are wondering what the "parfait party" was... he had picked up 2 parfaits for us to enjoy afterwards... but I guess he was in a rush to leave his place/nervous (maybe?) that he ended up leaving them at his place. Which worked out in the end because we were going back to his place to pick up his boat to bring to my parents house. We enjoyed them on the ride to my parents.
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