Or, as I call it, Beardodging

I was bit by the Geocaching bug again over the weekend, so we went out and hunted for a few caches that were close to home.

What follows is my log of the first "find" of the day:

Vo0 and I found this one today. There were a few people out fishing, but we decided to search it out anyway. After several minutes of looking, we were coming up empty, despite knowing pretty much where it had to be hiding.

As I started to dig through my pockets for the printout to decode the hint, one of the fishermen walked over and asked "What are you looking for?"

I froze. "Uh, well, see, there should be this..." I pointed feebly at my Geocache printout. "It's a container with a log that we're going to sign, and..."

"Oh, so it's like a scavenger hunt?"

Eureka! "Er, ye- I mean..."

"With your GPS there?"

"Yes, that!", I cried.

The fisherman thought for a second and then pointed at a guardrail. "Well, it's probably stuck under there." Within seconds, he had spotted the cache that we'd been blindly overlooking.

What a humbling experience -- beaten to the cache we were hunting by a complete stranger who had no clue what we were doing (I swear, we looked in that exact spot!). Fortunately, the fisherman turned out to be very nice. We explained Geocaching, and he thought it was a very cool idea. More importantly, he promised not to disturb the cache.

We thanked him, signed the log, replaced the cache, and slunk back to the car with our tails between our legs. It was still a fun hunt, if not quite what we were expecting.

The other cache we found was housed in an old Millennium Falcon action figure case. It's part of a series of Star Wars-themed caches located along the highway, so I think we're going to have to seek out the others soon.