I made the trip down to Wayland (about 25 miles from home) this afternoon after church to attend a funeral visitation for a long-time scouter that I've worked with on the Wood Badge executive committee. In fact, I took over my current position as WBA treasurer from him. Doc White was a good man and a good scouter. He made a difference to the scouts of Troop 97 for 50 years.
Doc loved the outdoors so I'm sure he wouldn't have minded that I did a little geocaching afterwards...I don't get as far south as Wayland too often and the weather was just gorgeous (for winter anyway, around 40 degrees)
Did two caches that were pretty easy (one would not have been easy if a cacher hadn't dug it out the day before) then stopped at a third one that was also easy. I parked across the street in an empty maintenance building lot, then found the cache in a bush next to the "Welcome to Wayland" sign. Signed the log (and I think I managed to lose a brand new red gel pen in the process....grrr) then turned around to trudge back through the knee high snow to my car only to see one of Wayland's finest pulled up by my car. Uh-oh! Walked back to the car, knowing I wasn't doing anything illegal. Sure enough, the officer rolled down his window as I approached and wanted to know what I had been doing. Honesty being the best policy, I asked him if he knew what geocaching was. He didn't, but was interested to hear my explanation and then told me to have a good afternoon and went on his way. Perhaps the fact that I was in my scout uniform helped my credibility? Anyway, I survived my first "cop while geocaching" encounter!
Did a last cache on the way home. It was a typical lightpole micro, I took the cache back to the car to sign the log and another car pulled in and parked in front of the nearby businesses. I decided to wait it out so they wouldn't see me return the cache. Doggone it, they weren't budging even after I did everything I could think of to while away a few minutes in the car. I got out of the car to put the cache back anyway, and the car drove over to the cache location. As they were pulling up, though, they shouted, "Hi, Mary!" so I knew that they were fellow geocachers who were waiting for ME to leave, then when I got out of the car they recognized me and knew it was ok to drive on up. Chance encounters with other cachers, especially ones you know, aren't all that common, so it was fun!
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