Leap Day Caching

Ever since the somewhat CDO^* Southern Man discovered the "statistics" page on geocaching.com last fall he's been a little...obsessive about his geocaching. In particular about "streaks" (consecutive days with finds) and "calendar caches" (finding a cache on every day of the year) and "county caches" (finding a cache in every county of the home state) and so on. So naturally Leap Day is a big deal and Southern Man carefully laid his plans.

Planning is necessary as Southern Man works a fifty-hour-plus week in four days (which he loves as it gives him three-day weekends if Friday is meeting-free) but that makes work-day caching a challenge. He usually picks up one or two on the commute between day and evening jobs, but Leap Day is special: Southern Man decided to do some morning caching as well so he cancelled his morning office hours and selected four to grab after his usual Wednesday-morning chiropractor visit. Much to his chagrin he found only one of the four. This wounded his pride sufficiently that he emailed the cache placers on two of them (both fairly well-known in the local caching community) and got very kind replies (and hints!) from both. That alone made the DNFs worthwhile. You meet the greatest people geocaching.

The plan for Stage Two was to slip away from the day job an hour early and hit a park with several caches that Southern Man hadn't yet visited. Well, the "leave an hour early" part didn't happen but Southern Man still had eighty minutes or so to try for five caches.

Geese in the park

Turtles!

He ended up with two and a half (the half was the first stage of a "multi-cache" but the second stage will have to wait for another day) but couldn't find two of them (one of which had been found just the previous day). He made a second pass on those but then time ran out and he had to scurry to the evening job.

Planning for Stage Three got to "If I'm not too tired after work tonight..." and didn't get any further than that. So only three (and a half) out of nine, which is well below Southern Man's usual average but it will have to do. And as it was Southern Man got home at about the same time as Teen Daughter and we had a most enjoyable conversation. Which, remarkably, is no longer unusual. She had picked up some nice dress shirts that day and modeled them, and promised to take Southern Man to that store for his upcoming birthday. Yes, he'll still be in his thirties.

Why does Southern Man geocache? Because it's fun! You should join him someday.

As before, will add pics when the film camera gets developed [updated 3/11].

* CDO is like OCD, only the letters are in the correct order. Why, yes, it does matter.