Filling in the Gaps

As promised, this is the second part of my post. When I last posted, our geocache count was at 1990. I don't need to say we passed our 2000 benchmark.

A week and a half ago, we went to Ottawa for GAG14. We got off to a late start because of ferry rides and stopping for dinner, but we still had a good count. We averaged 15 a day over three days (we stuck around and cached on Sunday too). Friday, we cleaned out the event caches in the West end for a total of 13 finds. This included our 2000th find which was on a trail. It wasn't an amazing cache, but it was a fun one. The cache owner had made a little doll out of squashes and made it a "guardian" called Sasquash! The trail was really wet too, which was strange since there wasn't a lot of rain lately. At one point, I hopped over a puddle on the trail because I ran out of dry ground to walk on. The other side was muddy and I slid. As I put my arms out for balance, I caught a tree and literally swung around it like Gene Kelly in "Singing in the Rain". In the end, all I did was briefly touch my knee to the ground. Safe!

We did a lot of trails on Saturday. So many, you could say our count suffered. Including a couple caches after the event gathering, we had a total of 17 finds. I'm not complaining, mind you. We still had an excellent time and the weather couldn't have been more beautiful. It did leave us utterly exhausted, though.

On Sunday, we picked up a few more we didn't get to during the event. We took a relaxing pace and even brought Kurt out to Stittsville to grab the trail caches we had started with. We got home later than we wanted to, but 15 finds for the trip home was a respectable count.

This past weekend was KACHE 2. An incredible 115 caches were published including six offerings from us. Kurt came down on Thursday night and spend Friday finding non-event caches (warming up I guess). On Friday, Jen and I left work and had a rough plan of how we were going to approach the start of the event. There was a wrinkle.

At about 4:45, we got a call from Kurt. He was way out in the West end and wanted us to pick him up. This did not make us happy. In the end we compromised. We went to the West end, but Kurt did not join us for our first find.

Ultimately, we had a rough night on Friday. It started well. We had five consecutive first-to-finds (FTF). Then it all fell apart on us. We got to one that had disappeared which marked our first DNF (did not find) of the night. Over the next seven caches we tried, we found two of them. At that pint, we decided it was time to go home for some sleep.

Saturday was amazing! Not only did we get 33 finds (including the event itself), six of those were the ones we couldn't find the night before. We felt very vindicated. I almost didn't want to go home. There was only one mark on the day which was a cache we tried twice with no luck. I think the most remarkable part was I actually got it all logged by Monday.

Sunday was much more relaxed. It didn't help, of course that we missed two ferries. We just missed the first one, so we went for lunch. That was our undoing because we ended up missing the next one by quite a margin. We saw it leave, but we were already 20 cars back. When we got to town, we kept it at a leisurely pace. We helped Kurt find a few we already had and went back to the one DNF from the day before. I don't know if it was funny or sad. We literally walked up to it and saw it. What makes it worse was I was about 20cm away from it the night before. That's the way these things roll, I guess.

Our final count for the weekend was 52 caches - including one I picked up on Monday during lunch. That brings our grand total to 2087. Jen and I have decided to take a couple weeks' break. This is good because we have been neglecting a lot of things - like house work.