I'd been waiting for it for a while now. Fellow geocachers who are also members of Gilda's Club (where I work) had asked for permission and had placed a geocache on the clubhouse grounds. I knew it had been submitted. Unfortunately, though, it wasn't approved and published until Saturday morning. I say unfortunately because the cache is only open during the week when the clubhouse is open. So no searching until today...
I had thought about leaving for work early since I had to be there in the morning today. It was pouring rain this morning, though, so there went that theory. By lunchtime, though, the rain had stopped so I spent my lunch break out there looking. No luck.
Went back after I got off work. Still no luck. The same people that had also been looking with me at lunchtime were back, and they finally gave up. A bit later, I went inside and begged my boss for any little snippets of information that she could give me. She had walked with the cache placers and, though she is not a cacher, knew where every stage was placed.
All she would tell me was that it was on a branch. Well we'd searched every branch we could but I went back and did it again. No luck. Was headed back towards the clubhouse when I saw her again. She then told me the general location of the first stage (which was way off from the posted coords) and I was able to find the first stage and really get started. This was after about an hour and a half of searching between lunch and then. The coords at the first stage led me to the OTHER side of where I'd previously been searching, and after a bit of a search I found the container with the next coords. Meanwhile, a young couple showed up looking where I'd been looking before (the posted coords.) I filled them in on what I now knew and they helped me look for stage 2, though I'm the one that finally found it.
On we went to stage 3. This led us to the rock wall between the driveway and the staff parking lot. We were doing a lot of searching and apparently amusing more than a few people that reported that there were three people crawling around the rock wall... my boss was among those who came out, thankfully, and nudged me in the right direction to find the 3rd stage. I shared my new knowledge with the other couple, and the guy was the one who found stage 3. We all went on to stage 4. I knew what the container looked like (remember I'd seen it at a staff meeting a few weeks ago) so once I saw the general location, it was only a matter of time before I looked in the right bush and found the cache. First to find! (though I shared the honors with the other cachers with me.) Can't tell you how many times I've probably walked right past it since it's been hidden....
Close to two hours spent on this tonight, but it was worth it. How could I -not- get the FTF on a cache this close to me?
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