From here...everywhere!: A Cautionary Tale...

It happens to all of us male cachers eventually, I guess. I don't know if it's an age thing, physical, psychological or what. Saturday night, I was getting ready to get down to business. Had everything ready, told her what was about to go down, looked down...and it wasn't there.

It's been there the last two years, as far back as I can remember, but not tonight. All I could think of was that something was horribly, horribly wrong. I mean I take care of it, I clean it regularly, I hold on to it when I am in the woods, I never just whip it out in public (well, almost never) but now...

I was devastated. She said it was okay and that it had probably happened to all my friends. I don't think so. Maybe one out of three guys that I know. But not me. I am always so careful with it.

But as a man and a cacher I had to come to terms with it. I needed to talk to someone who might have been through a similar situation so I texted Blaze132. No response.

I went into a panic. I went out to the garage alone. I tore the car apart. Ripped into my backpack.

No doubt about it. This wasn't a question of it not functioning properly or finding true north. My Oregon was gone.

Blaze132 started texting me the next morning. Where was the last place I remembered having it? At the back of my car, I though I'd put it in my pack. Have you been in your pack and car since? Yes, I went through the whole thing last night. Are you sure? Yes.

So I went back out to Andrew Jackson State Park Sunday morning. Dreading going back to the two caches that I had placed here Saturday in the bitter cold that dropped here Sunday. The wind was hitting at 20 to 30 mph. I know that's not a big deal up north, but 19° and that kind of wind here will take the wind out of your sails, so to speak. I spoke with Blaze132 along the way about what I was doing and that I would check in with the Ranger and see if anyone turned it in at the office. No such luck.

Now let me tell you something about one of my friends. They show up. Even when I haven't asked. After leaving the Rangers office I headed back to my car to put on something a little warmer. Who pulls up? Blaze132. A pictures worth a thousand words, but I think thirteen will do for the caption.


We're friends cause we met through geocaching. We're buddies cause he shows up...

So, yay! Misery loves company, and we headed out across the way we came in from the last placement Saturday. Down the trails, across the dam, and into the woods.

No sign. Here I can tell you that I had little hope of finding it. I mean I would like to say if I found something like that I would take it to the Rangers office and turn it in. But I don't have that kind of faith in people anymore and with the wind and all blowing leaves as it had the night before, I would have thought that it would have been covered. We combed the woods around the cache location for the better part of thirty minutes. Nothing.

I took a reading again with my trusty old 60cs and prepared to walk back to the other cache. I don't mind the walking so much, I've been doing that a lot lately. Just the cold.

As we walked back scanning the ground and talking (about things best not posted to a public blog on the grounds that it may incriminate us later) Blaze132 had the idea of looking in my car as a a second set of eyes, you never know what you're going to miss when you're upset kind of thing and I had to agree with him. We ran into some of the groundskeepers and I readily offered them a one hundred dollar reward if they found it. They agreed to be on the lookout for it.

So returning to the car we opened up the hatch and I grabbed my pack first and started going through it again, this would be the fifth time.

Ain't it always the last place you look?

It had been in my bottle holder the whole time. So that's my story for today I guess. I told Blaze I would post it, and so I have. No one laughs at me more than I do.