Our first hide part 3

Boy, we had a busy weekend! With a mixed bag of successes and failures.

You may remember what happened to our first hide (disgusting!). The second had to be moved because it was too close to a published cache. No problemo! We measured more carefully and moved the sucker further down the trail. Then it was too close to an unpublished secret cache. So (sigh) we hauled ourselves up the mountain trail again and moved it down the hillside and much further off the trail and crossed our fingers. Then it got rejected for being too close to the first cache we crowded. Actually, we were right on top of it. Oops! We gave the guy the coordinates to the micro we first crowded! LOL

Hello had a family event on Saturday in a community rose garden and I went along, then we went caching afterwards. We found one in a cute neighborhood park, at the far end where there were some christmassy looking pine trees and an awesome cat. We petted the cat and found the cache, petted the cat, petted the cat some more. Hello would have liked to take that cat home but he was collared and tagged and obviously well taken care of, just enjoying some "me" time in the park. We went back up the mountain to retake the coordinates of this stubborn second hide and to try to find another before dark, but had to quit on it for the night. Soon, Hello realized her cell phone was missing. Crap. Could be anywhere. A phone call to the family didn't pan out, we hurried back to the rose garden, no phone there. Now it was full dark and we had to call it an evening and get some food. Hoping for some good news, we checked on our hide. It was STILL too close to that secret puzzle cache. CRAP! It wasn't our best caching day. So, we decided that Sunday would be our day. We'd find the phone, move our cache to just the right spot, and a stubborn Hello baby would be born. His poor momma had been trying to evict him for two days. We were exhausted, so we vegged in front of Finding Nemo and then called it a day.

Sunday we raced off to undo all our failures. No one reported kidnapping Hello's phone from the rose garden. We checked the christmas tree/cat park, no luck. We went to retrieve our second hide and hopefully get far enough away from the secret one (seriously, is this guy hiding his allowance in there or what?). So we haul ourselves up there and retrieve our cache, and what do you suppose is lying right on top of a field of golden leaves, glinting silver in the sun? Hello's phone! I swear to God, it winked at me. Does it work? Yes! HA! Here we go now. Everything is going to be alright. We are going to walk far away from this crappy hillside and plant this cache just right. A woman helpfully let us know there was a five foot snake in the area earlier in the day. "Thank you", I call back. I'm thinking, there's 10,000 snakes in here. Thanks a whole frackin' lot. You've saved my life, seriously. A snake was on the mountain? Did you call SWAT? The National Guard? Hello, get your mace out! Oh yes, I'm getting testy, knock it off. It's going to be approved today and we can spend the last part of the day watching to see if the first to finders come a-runnin' and see if we hid it well enough for the old timers to look confuzzled once or twice. We hide it really well, simply setting it among the natural landscape and camo'd with natural materials. The old timers will be all over it but someone like me is going to curse a little (or a lot) before they end up hands and knees in the dirt and simply pull it out with a relieved grin lol. We send in the new coordinates and go caching. When we come in later to check, we have no approval but we do have a baby! YES! Everything is going to be alright. We go caching, come back to check and, we are still too close to the super secret puzzle cache. Mother........let's say I hit the end of my patience with this cache I have to stay away from but it's location is a secret. What the fudge? We were finally advised just to avoid that whole mountain. Thanks guys.

As I rinsed off a serious amount of dirt, muttering about how this is supposed to be a game and why be so serious and closed mouth about this cache I can't get away from that must contain state secrets or a Honus Wagner card or SOMETHING just too frackin' special to tell me about, I finally remembered to tell myself the same. It's a game. Don't like the rules? Don't play. You don't complain about not being able to find a cache because you like to be in the park anyway. Go get your cache off the mountain and try somewhere else. Enjoy the scenery, fill your shoes with foxtails, be happy.

Meatloaf says "two out of three ain't bad". That was okay for Sunday, but we are going to find the perfect spot tonight. I know it.