Friday, April 25, 2008

A day in Oxford

Another record day- 40 caches! Abuhhhh and I met up after work and decided to tackle the 5/2 puzzle final to Coach T's Geosense series. I had a talk with Coach about it, and he pointed some things out that I didn't notice before on the cache page which helped me in the direction to figuring out this cache without the coord fixes he provides in the previous 8 caches in the series. Abuhhhh got credit for being the FIRST person in the history of the cache to point out one very obvious (it would seem) aspect of the series, but we won't discuss that on here.

Anyways, after finding this and one of the other pieces of the series, we headed for Oxford, Ohio.
We tackled a good blend of caches: smalls, micros, unknowns, regulars. We tried to tackle the multi - but couldn't make it to the final by the time we finished caching (around 1:30 am). We started off with some nice hikes on the Miami University Nature Areas trail system they have up there (over 15 miles -which several of our caches of the day were on). We managed to also complete 4 of the 5 caches on the trail system that runs right along side of the campus in the dark. It wasn't marked that we couldn't go on them at night, and it actually, I feel, made for a better more enjoyable hike. We got away from car noise, and really any form of noise at all. It was a pleasant night, and it actually made the quality of the cache and hide seem a lot higher.

After the trail systems, and being in the dark already for atleast an hour, we decided to start nailing some of the P&G's. It was a nice blend, like I said before, of park and grabs, and stop, spend a little time but not too much and grabs.

Abuhhhh's record to this point in one day had been 23, so we shattered that pretty early on - it was a great day. It had cured my itch I previously wrote about, and was a great time of hiking - finding some easy and difficult caches. I told Ian the only thing that could make this night would be a cop encounter -
and we had success in that!

We were Looking for Miami Beach actually when it happened. I was down by the creek (in the dark mind you) while Abuhhhh was on the side of the guard rail by this bridge. I was looking when a cop car stopped next to Ian and he shined his light and asked, "You looking for something?" He told him we were looking for a geocache, and the cop asked if we had found it yet. He told the cop I was down looking for it, so I shined my light around to show I was there. Eventually the cop left us be, and I finally located the grab.

8 Hours later I can say I was pleasantly surprised how this particular night of caching after work went. It was one of my favorite caching days, and the record day so far - 40! We'll try to get back in the area soon and tackle the rest - lots of good hikes left to finish!

No comments: