The challenge of the hunt

A lot of my friends get that glazed over look when I start talking about geocaching.  Pure and simple, it's my hobby and I enjoy it and I like sharing it with other people.  Once I know people aren't interested in it, I'll stop talking about it to them, but I won't stop talking about it.  I hope that makes sense.

This past weekend was my birthday.  My parents called me fairly early in the morning to sing Happy Birthday to me.  They figured I'd be out geocaching and they were right. I was eating breakfast waiting for my friend, Jim to show up and then we were going to head down to Lake Elsinore for some caching.

Lately, he and I have gotten into challenge caches.  A challenge cache is just that.  It gives you a certain challenge, then you have to meet that challenge before you can log a find on the cache in question.  We looked for several challenges on Saturday.  One of them, at least for me, was the most memorable, Discovering and Logging California's 58 Counties.  Back when I was writing Electronic Breadcrumbs, which was exclusively about geocaching, I wrote about that challenge.  

A year and a half ago, I qualified for that challenge by finding caches in the last four counties in California where I hadn't found a cache.  The last county was Napa County. Saturday became the day that I wanted to get the final for that challenge, so my friend obliged me since he hadn't fulfilled the requirements yet.  We had the coordinates and we made the half mile hike up the side of this small hill near Lake Elsinore and I made the find.

In Geocaching, I'm usually not interested in anything that's inside the cache.  It's more the thrill of the hunt that interests me.  There are times when I don't use the GPS at all, preferring to use wits (some would say I only have half of those anyway) and Google maps to find the cache.  Most of the time I'm successful with those finds.

Jim and I ended up finding two others later in the day, one of which ended up being my 5500th geocache found.  I'd actually planned for that to happen, since the numbers will probably only coincide this one time, it was kind of nice to get #5500 on my 55th birthday.

As always, I like to cache with someone else.  My usual caching partners are my friend Jim who lives in Camarillo and my son Elliott.  Elliott doesn't go out as often as he used to, but he likes to cache when we go camping every summer.  The photo of him is in the Zion Narrows taking coordinate readings for a cache we found there.  That was actually tough to do since the canyon walls are so narrow, satellite reception is very sketchy back there.

This summer, Elliott and I plan on camping in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.  I haven't been there since I was in Junior High, so it will be all new to me as well. Since we're going to be close, we'll probably geocache not only in Colorado, but also New Mexico, which will give me 10 states that I've found caches in.  And yes, there is a challenge for that as well.  I've already found it, but haven't logged it.  After we come back this summer, I'll log it as found - Challenge accepted - Challenge accomplished.