Q. What do a long weekend, work around the house and rainy bad weather have in common?
A. Geocaching.
Well it goes like this. There is more than enough work to do around the house to fill a long weekend, but it is raining, cold and impossible to get outside to do it. So lets go geocaching. I know, I know, it’s still in the rain but at least this is fun and not muscle rending hard labour (at least it’s not meant to be). We originally had planned to do the ones in the station country northwards, but the weather sort of put an end to that, so we pile into the car and head for some of those caches that the Wife hasn’t had much luck with towards Whyalla.
The first one was Simpsons Gap. The Wife, H9 and C6 had searched for this twice a couple months before without finding it. Apparently there had been a flat, white rock on the ground then which the Wife thought marked the spot, but it was no longer within cooie. The GZ was fairly wet from the rain the night before and also the spits of drizzle that were falling intermittently now making it a dirty task to search. After scratching around with her foot like a bush turkey for 10 minutes or so, the Wife wondered off to get the camera (perhaps she thought she could use it like an x-ray machine to see underground). It was then that I located the cache and lifted it from it’s resting place. This obviously was placed by a dedicated cacher as there was a lot of work that went into placing this cache. We also let a BIG BLACK SPIDER, that we found in the back yard, loose here (much squealing, screeching and tiptoeing from H9 and C6). Don’t worry, it was nowhere near the cache site. 

We then continued on our journey to The Institute. This was another one that the Wife, H9 and C6 couldn’t find. By the time we arrived here, the drizzle was becoming more constant but this didn’t stop the enthusiasm (for a start anyway). The Wife remembered that she had read a previous post that said “Mum Grom used a stick and tap tap, there it was!”. So there was much tapping with sticks, stones and anything else we could lay our hands on. It sounded like a corroboree was taking place and all we needed was a didgeridoo player. Still no luck (maybe this one was going to be our nemesis after Wife had successfully located Krupp Werks). So while C6 climbed up the tree, I decided to do some digging. Well the ground is now well prepared for planting. Wasn’t an inch of soil within GZ vicinity (obviously there was, the inch that the cache was hidden in), that wasn’t turned over by me. I looked like I’d been rooting for truffles for a week without having a wash. Eventually I located the inch that hadn’t been tilled and there it was, smugly nestled in it’s hidey hole. The Wife couldn’t believe it and C6 nearly fell out of the tree, while H9 crawled out of the warm car to do the swaps.

Since we had come this far we thought it would be no great feat to go a little further and we ended up in Whyalla where we bought lunch and took it to the GZ of Hourly, Daily. We tried the numbers we found in several different combinations which resulted in several coordinate sets. The first turned out to be in some poor, unsuspecting persons front yard. Retry with next set. Ended up on the road in the middle of nowhere next to a fast food establishments carpark. Recalculated with next lot of numbers and ended up not much further away on a barren piece of land. Too many variables for me. I gave up and so did everyone else. Time to move on to the next cache Leisuremaster, which had also beaten the Wife a few days before hand. Arrived at GZ and searched exhaustively (even thought we should count the leaves), for the digits needed to finish the cache coords but turned up empty handed. We looked so hard we even started to see imaginary numbers in the bark of the tree at GZ. By now it was drizzling rather heavily and the muggles coming out of nearby swim centre were looking at us kind of strange like, so gave this one up as a DNF and got out of there. 

It was time to give up on Maux Faux’s multi-caches and search for something that we could physically find and touch without the help of Deep Blue to unscramble the clues. So we made a beeline, in a roundabout way, for Reserved. When we arrived at GZ I instinctively knew where to look, so while C6 and H9 played on the flying fox (unlike the ones of my childhood), I lifted the cache from it’s protective cover. While signing the log, we were amazed by the audacity of an elderly gentleman who was hitting a golf ball from one side of the oval to the next in complete ignorance of the posted signs. How Rude. Perhaps he can’t read! Although we had been thinking about it all day, it was here that it finally dawned on us that we had found 99 caches and that the next find would be number 100. With the drizzly rain becoming more like proper rain we were spurred on once again to continue onto the next closest cache. 

The cache in question was, of course, Whyalla Wetlands. It wasn’t long before we were at GZ with a warning to C6 not to go down to the waters edge because it would be muddy. We had been searching for a couple of minutes when a car of muggles turned up. It was now that I noticed C6 had disobeyed my warning and was at this very moment poised to hurl a handful of mud into the water. A yell from me saw C6 stumble in his haste to get away from the water and land on hands and knees in RED, STICKY, GOOEY get EVERYWHERE mud. You know, the stuff that turns up even when you are 100% sure you’ve cleaned it all off. We abandoned the search while I took C6 to go and clean his hands. I then took off his boots and knocked them against the bricks to clean the mud off when I noticed that one of the bricks moved. The muggles in the car then left but then Wife and I had to make small talk for a bit as a muggle was walking along the path towards and past us. When we continued our search for the cache I lifted the brick to find…… you guessed it. The cache. Wow. A hundred caches found. A ton of them (in number, not weight). 

Well with a hundred finds behind us, there was nothing left to do but continue on to the double ton. Back in the car, a quick U-turn and we were on our way to Flushed. We sort of figured we knew what we would find at GZ, but didn’t really expect to see all the bird life that was there. Located GZ and the cache fairly quickly, picking up Sony Cacheman Geo Mobile Phone TB and dropping off Red Jeep TB. The Wife figured it would be quicker if she walked down the road a bit to take a picture while I was filling out the log.  She nearly ended up being bogged in the same RED, STICKY, GOOEY get EVERYWHERE mud as C6 after she tried to step around a puddle. Women! Like cars, can’t live with them, can’t live without them. A quick cleanup (longer than if she would have waited) and onto the next cache. 

Upon arrival at To be continued…. I noticed that it was a multi-cache. With our record for multi’s today I was a bit apprehensive of continuing, but after Wife noticed it was by Bunya and not Maux Faux, we decided to give it a bash. Well done Bunya, you certainly know how to do them. Doesn’t take a Professor in Mathematics or a computer geek to work out yours. Found the digits and transposed them to find the next coords. We parked parallel to the cache GZ and the Wife nearly stepped in some dog do that I had parked next to (this would have topped off her day). Well this is where she told me to stop. We saw some interesting fungii at cache location and while the Wife took some photos, I searched for and located cache. Man, we were getting wet as the rain was now the heaviest it had been all day. If it was going to continue like this, we were going to have time for a couple more caches and then we would have to quit. We played swapsies (not tootsies) and I picked up the Cornwall GC. 

With the success of this multi, we took on the task of tracking down another multi by Bunya called Rudder. I think that I made it look harder than it was meant to be. For a start, there was no sun so I couldn’t track down true East. I sort of guessed it. I then started to search every bush in the park as the first couple of trees yielded nothing. Finally I had only one really bushy bush left to search. As if I wasn’t wet enough already, this bush seemed to have held onto every last rain drop it had collected all day, only to let it drip onto me as I looked for the cache. I was about to give up and the Wife was heading on down the hill checking my progress when low and behold there it was. To save time I signed the log, put it back and got out of there. Sopping wet.  

We figured we had time for one more quick one before it was to dark or too wet (how much wetter could we get?) to continue. So from Rudder I pointed the car in the direction of Bruce Henry Peterson. Just after the stop lights I did a U-turn and ended on the other side of the road next to GZ. Try as we might, we could not find the cache. Once again the bushes were against us and by now our shoes and feet were completely saturated and it didn’t help when the Wife stood and took photos while I was crawling through the undergrowth (not literally). The rain was coming down heavier and we could have filled a rain water tank if we had wrung out our clothes, so we decided to log it as a DNF and will be back when the weather is finer to have another go (if it’s there). So it was into the car and off to Hungry Jacks for tea as per the instruction from C6 and H9.

It truly was a cache success and a good day. Then again, any daying playing is better than the best day working.