Geocaching: A New Year
As we were sitting back on New Years Eve, an email came in announcing a new cache being approved about 20 miles from home.
It was located in a park where we have hiked before and we didn’t have enough time to go out to get it before the park closed so we decided to get up on New Years day and try for the First To Find (FTF) on the new cache. We had a bunch of work we wanted to catch up on so a run for a single cache was set up and we sat back to ring in the new year.
We got up in the morning and took our time getting ready as it had rained all night and the thought of hiking in the mud slowed us both down a bit. By the time we got ready the sun was coming up and it was a bright, sunny morning, which is unusual for Upstate NY in the winter.
We arrived at the cache site to see a couple of cars in the lot and as we were getting ready, another car pulled in. Our thoughts of being first to find were now past. We started hiking up the path and passed a couple of dog walkers on the way. As we approached the cache location there was no one around so we grabbed it to sign the log just as another cacher was approaching. As it turned out, we were the FTF and the lady cacher we met had driven from Buffalo to get the same prize we were after.
That cache signaled several firsts for us. It was the first cache of the year, the first time we ran into any other cachers while on the hunt and we got the first to find prize which was the Geo Coin pictured below.
We came back home to get back to work and noticed it was a warm 50 degrees out with bright sunshine. On a normal day, we would have worked, but heck, lets go back out and try to find a few more since we had such nice weather on a January day. We made a quick run to the town of Wayland to find a few caches and as could have been expected, the weather caught up with us and by 2:00 PM we found ourselves walking in a park, in the rain. We did score 4 more finds before we called it a day and returned to the shop.