The hunt of death lol

There is this hide we’ve spent hours looking for in a very pretty urban park. The dirt ground is swept clean, the redwood trees are awesome, lots of grass – nice park. With a horrible hide in it. We’ve hunted and hunted and left dejected and low so many times. You see, almost immediately after we give it up as impossible, another cacher would find and log about how easy it was. “Walked right up – maybe 30 seconds of looking – thanks for the easy hide!” Yeah yeah. So back we’d go. I find myself pacing the fence line, scanning every square inch of ground, glancing at Hello, hoping for a gesture of excitement. She often had her arms wrapped completely around the pretty redwoods, praying to the tree spirit for help I assume, or weeping quietly to herself. I couldn’t quite tell through my own tears of frustration.
So that’s how we started the day.
Spent an hour with more of the above. Giving each other grim looks as we passed by one another. Lots of innocent muggles in the park today, playing basketball, throwing horseshoes, running on the grass.
Hello says we need a cover story, so we are looking for a tag that fell off the dog’s collar. Okay, works for me! So I am staring up into an oak tree when a man asks me what I am doing. So much for the cover story. I tell him we are playing a game, like a scavenger hunt, and something has been hidden for us to find. He was interested, asked some questions and told me how he came across one in another park. He didn’t know what it was, but he signed the log and put it back. Nice fellow. One muggle educated! That’s a first for us.
An hour later, CRAP! I quit. Let’s go find something else and come back with a fresh point of view. So off we go.
A couple of our hunts today included solving puzzles, which we aced because we are fabulous. We got a couple of hides in town, one of them in a cacher’s front yard! We sat down in his driveway to dig through it. Stealth, thy name is not Hellolost nor Saz. Have to work on that. There was one in a strange rocky park across the street from a garage band. They did not entertain us for very long, maybe a minute or so before they stopped playing some fast metal music that had me bobbing my head. Maybe they were watching us. We got this one after a bit of searching. I got a tiny thorn in my finger, too, that is starting to blister up. It still kind of hurts.
But that was nothing compared to what happened at the bomb site. This cache site really did look like a bomb went off. There was a crater and huge chunks of concrete and twisted metal things and some nice soft looking green plants. Stinging nettles and Hello in open topped shoes!
Ouch!
Ouch!
ACK!
Get some real shoes!
Okay!
Ouch ouch ouch.
In the car and wiping feet with antibacterial wipes. I shouldn’t have laughed, but it was kind of funny.
There is a walking trail near eBay where we found one. Tree cover made nailing down the coordinates hard, but the area was not very large and we got it. We walked around the water district's perc ponds, some we hadn’t been to yet, so that was good. This was a small walk and a clever hide. We saw a lizard here that was about 18 inches long. I thought he was icky – too snakelike. So of course, Hello adored him and wanted to pet him. He ran for it, lol.
Another clever hide was found along one of the prettier urban trails beside a clear and free flowing creek. We’ve been along this creek many times already and it’s one of the nicer places to have a walk to see what you can see. There were two pretty mallards floating in a peaceful tree covered spot, and that’s about all I saw besides hordes of muggles enjoying the trail as well. In fact, as we stood beside the trail to check our location, two bicycles went by and one definitely said “geocachers”.
Gotta work on that stealth bit. Honestly.
We did some hunting up near the famed albino colony of Shannon Road. They may also have been murderous cannibals. There are stories. We looked for three caches along the hilly dirt trail, possibly amongst poisonous snakes and plants. My favorite! The first near the trail head has likely been muggled. We found a movable brick in a retaining wall, behind which was a hollowed out spot that must have been made for a cache. So we went down the trail to catch the second one. We had to leave the trail and Hello spotted the poison plants, so we managed to avoid those. I made some noise with my feet and kicked pinecones and stuff around, no rattling rattlesnake, so we felt free to examine the off trail area and it was found fairly quickly. We were on the upper part of the trail and the view of the south valley below us was gorgeous. We also saw a few lizards, the ordinary short ones that I think are cute, poppies and pink flowers, but no albinos.
The next one was at the bottom of the trail, likely an hour walk down the mountainside, so we hiked back up to the car. Which was parked on top of a steep hill about 300 feet from the trail entrance below. Again. Why do we keep doing that to ourselves? I think it’s a subconscious quest for exercise. So we hauled ourselves up the hill and drove off in search of refreshment. We headed into a rustic area with no water.
Again.
A couple of Big Gulps and we were off. The third cache near the bottom of this trail, we didn’t get it. We might have, we were absolutely in the right spot, but it was also directly on the trail head on a residential street. A woman suddenly appeared in front of a house. When she was not staring at us, she was staring at a bright yellow fire hydrant.
Just absolutely studying it.
It is either the most interesting and coolest fire hydrant in town and she was afraid we’d steal it, or she was keeping an eye on us. Likely the latter, so a bit creeped out, we left this one for another day.
We finished the day with our old nemesis amongst the redwood trees. Pacing, muttering the hider’s verses, hoping for a lightening bolt of inspiration, cursing him and his evil hide anyway.
Crap crap crap.
No friggin’ idea.
We have to ask for a hint. Done for the day.
Mr. Hello took us out to eat as we brooded over that darn hide that every cacher but us has found so easily. We part company and Hello logs our finds and begs for a clue. We were happily obliged the next day and we ran over there to try, try again. We had a smaller location to search and the approximate cache size. I swear, we spent another hour combing through just ONE CORNER of this park and if you don’t think I felt dumber than a block of concrete, you’re wrong! I did find an arrow, which I thought would be fun to poke Dr. Jekyll with if I ever met him. It’s in the car just in case. Then…then…we found it! We both went right through this spot so many times. ARGH! It was very anticlimactic. We should have had the sucker four searches ago. Oh well. We went and spent some money on swag and felt better. I might not poke Dr. Jekyll afterall.