Jump to content

The Cost Of Caching!?


GlobalRat

Recommended Posts

There are quite a few stories that I've heard over the last three years of peoples caching adventures. The conversation inevitably leads to what 'sacrifices' have been made while on the hunt.

 

If there were a competition for this, I think F of QFC would win hands down, for the item he "left" at Confidence Reef... wonder whether the next cacher will find it... B) , but I'll let him tell the story.

 

This thread is for you to post and share your adventure of loss while on the hunt.

 

Personally, I have a habit of dashing off to caches during lunch breaks or just after work. The result has been the destruction of 4 pairs of work trousers, a formal and expensive work shirt, and the demise of a fancy pair of shoes. Half my wardrobe has now been dedicated as "caching outfits".... so when you approach a cache and notice shreds of clothing draped in thorn trees and a crazy dude in the distance, half nekkid, licking wounds.... it's probably me.

 

BUT, with my recent gift... expect an Indiana Jones character easing through the primitive jungles of Africa :grin: (will be strictly reserved for alien vegetation!)

Link to comment

I have a habit of ruining my sunglasses.

While placing View from the Top, I was walking down the scree slop, with my sunglasses in my hands, when of course I slipped and landed on my glasses, crushing them to death.

Then, while doing Cownchicken's Winelands, I left another pair behind somewhere at some rest stop.

 

Oh, and never forget to take your GPS out of your car overnight, as you tend to wake up to a broken window and no GPS :-(

On the plus side, it does allow one to permanently "borrow" your friends now-ex-boyfriends Saudi Arabian GPS which does have 3 decimal places, unlike my old one.

 

I also seem to have lost the "H" on the front of my Honda over some particularly bumpy dirt road near Cape Aghulas, so now I drive an 'Onda - I think they make them in the east end of London

 

However, I think the most expensive thing about geocaching for all of us is the petrol price :-(

Link to comment

A couple of weeks ago we spent the day in Ceres and decided to try to get to Highest in Western Cape. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it?

 

Our cachemobile of choice is a 2 tons of steel, eguipped with a very thirsty V6. The drive up Matroosberg was, you could say, somewhat worse than expected. It was sopping wet and badly gouged by wheelspin. After the first two tough sections my car battery went dead... open the bonnet... ah. It's broken. Yes, broken. The force of the 4WD shaking as it bounced its way across the boulders cracked the entire battery casing in four places. We managed to urge another start from it (with battery fluid now draining off into the engine bay (and I did not even want to think about the gasses...) and continued up the mountain. We parked when we ran out of road (couldn't see, as we had spent the last vertical 3000 feet in dense cloud), facing downhill for the run strat! Followed the GPS needle as we slipped over the iced-up sections and easily located the cache. The final insult: the pen didn't work. We stratched a faint B+F into the paper and left before the wind blew us off.

 

The cost for this one cache:

Petrol: R400

New battery: R800

Entry to Matroosberg: R250

Total: R1450 (plus usual wear and tear stuff)

 

And it was awesome! B)

 

B+F

Link to comment

Hahaha, seems I'm not the only one to find out that this "free" sport of ours can run up the costs severely:

 

Day out at PMB to meet other cachers circa R450, leaving your GPS on the car roof and speeding off in a hurry to find another, R4800 (this was in PTA), getting stuck and using your 4x4 to get out, in the process turning the side shaft off (do not understand why or how yet..) R5000...

 

Other goodies required to play, containers, entrance fees, etc.: R???

TB's lost / stolen / etc.: R250

 

Pleasure of explaining the extra cost on the budget and logging a FTF or 50th / 100th: PRICELESS!!!!

 

As in the rest of my life: The cost of enjoyment and outdoor activities is not calculated for the fear of it being removed from the budget.

Link to comment

I suppose I can consider myself very lucky !!

 

Like all of you, I to have spent money on the sport (2nd hand GPs, cache conainers & contents, lost caches, internet access & "Being nice to the Better Half" )

 

On our trip to Cape Town, we went to find Noon Gun. I put my GPS down on a log while trying to find the cache.

A few hours later we were sitting in a Wimpy on the otherside of the bay when I decided to enter the Co-Ords for "Post Cards on the Rocks....well guess where my GPS was.....?

Back into the car.....I was so lucky....the GPs was still there....pointing at the cache (3m away)

 

Shew !!!!

Edited by Whostops
Link to comment

Well, where do we start .........!

 

Our last trip overseas. in 2002, we managed to leave our digital camera at the very last cache we did en route to Heathrow - it was never heard from again!

 

This trip we managed to bang the new one and now the shutter won't open. For a quotation to look at it and try and repair it - £57! Us and our camera left the shop rapidly!

 

That's to say nothing of the chipped spectacles of the Tricky Vicky part of this duo - they flew off his on the top of some mountain in a gale, not far from home. Here I should add, they are those verifocal ones in real smart light weight metalless frames that now look really smart!

 

And then for the car! Eventually gave up on the last one and replaced it when we just couldn't afford to waste another cent on it.

 

But, besides all that and all the other things that happen while geocaching, we have a great deal of fun and enjoy ourselves thoroughly!

Link to comment

I have read enough of other peoples losses to now be able to talk about my own *sniff* *sniff*. (that is Part 2 of QFC's)

 

For all you that may not know, QFC is rather young into the world of caching and as young caches one does not understand the finer concepts of planning, costs, safety, finding caches, hiding caches, finding the correct (closest) place to park the car, checking to see if the cache is currently available, jumping over fences, jumping over walls and many, many, many more things. But I like to think that we are learning as we go along and that with the help of the community we will evolve :lol: into more skilled cachers.

 

This is a story of loss; it involves 2 cachers (parts 2 and 3 of QFC) and an additional C that we have taken on a few of our cachers. With a system due to be roled out in Swaziland on the coming Monday and me still fixing bugs we decided that there was nothing good to do and that we should go and find a cache (lack of planning). Looking at the list of closest caches, part 2 pointed out that there were (or have be a number of caches available in the Roodepoort area). All the same caches or no caches, we headed out in that general direction with one cache in mind. Now being a very organised bunch, of course we read the cache description, noted that the park in which the cache was in was closed, and would only be open in a few months time.

 

Arriving at the entrance to the park, you can imagine our surprise to see it closed and to see that it would only be open in a few months time. GRRRR…. So hoping that we would find another entrance we drove around the park, communicated with the locals and found out that some of the people bordering the park have keys to the gates and periodically take a walk though the park. Deciding that we would be locals for the day, and therefore deserved entrance to the park, we made friends with some razor wire and abandoned my car on some nice person’s lawn.

 

We found the cache with only a few minutes of light remaining (search for close to half an hour) and hotfooted it across the mountain, veld, boulders and bushes to the large concrete wall. Here we proved again, again and again that white man can’t jump and with minor injuries made it to safety. After this mad scramble came the half to one kilometre walk back to were we had left the car……… (long pause…..)

 

Rounding the first corner we joke about what would happen if the car was missing…. Rounding the second corner, we realised what would happen if the car was missing….

 

All was as we had left it, oil stain on the grass (car had a water and oil leak), no glass on the road, dents in the grass from the car’s wheels, and well no car.

 

So to end this essay, all I can say is.

 

Took: Bottle with sand.

Left: Toy car, goon (big marble), and VW Jetta 3 CSX, 1.8

 

…… much more to this story, including my car being logged as a blue fox by the police ?!??, but that is a story for another time.

Link to comment

Wow, those are some expensive sounding stories. I was mugged by shrubbery on my way back from 'Blood, Sweat and Sandy Bay' - the bastard bush grabbed the lanyard of my Fuji Finepix with one of his branches, yanked it out of my pocket and catapulted it 10m back down the trail. It still took pics but the LCD never worked again. Several weeks later a light-fingered former acquaintance made off with my eTrex Venture. Luckily both items were covered by insurance, so I wasn't too deeply out of pocket.

Link to comment

On my way to placing my latest cache (in an urban setting) I was the victim of an attempted mugging/assualt. thankfully I was quick enough to run accross the street to the McDonalds, where three guys chased me and proceeded to harass me for about 20 minutes outside the entrance to McDonalds. Finally made it inside and sat for a while debating if all this is worth it.

 

I kept everything I had on me, including my Garmin GPSmap 60cs in my bag, but have lost a little more 'faith' in the whole walking down the sidewalk at noon idea.

 

I have decided that I really need to get myself a cache-mobile soon! <_<

Link to comment

Welcome to Cape Town, vespa! That's the sad part of it, though - we're not safe anywhere, if we're alone. All the more reason for me to find a team mate soon.

 

(Curses! My plan to acquire your 60CS failed miserably! I shall have to hire better goons. :o )

Edited by Goofster
Link to comment

Something good about geocaching after I read of all the troubles some of you guys had.

I recently bought my wife a nice quad, but needed to go from Upington to Vereeniging to get it. It really was a bargain so all the trouble was worth it. On our way back and driving through Potchefstroom I took a sidelong look (believe it if you want to) at the Geko 201 and saw that Mooirivier cache is only 1,5km away from us. Not knowing if we would ever get to Potch again we (I) decided to see whether we could find this cache. While driving towards the cachesite I saw a cloud of smoke billowing out from the wheels of the trailer Unto which this new quad (worth 80 g - not bragging , just proving how "lucky" we were) was strapped. I stopped and saw that the bolt of one of the springs was broken and that the axle shifted sideways. The tyre was running against the body of the trailer. We unloaded the quad, flipped the trailer and reassembled the axle. Went to town , bought new bolts, fitted, flipped and reloaded the quad. The cache was arhived about 3 weeks prior to our visit (we couldnt find it - needless to say) but luckily I didnt see it before we left home. Imagine what could have happened if we did'nt go to look for this cache, was driving at 120km/h between Potch and Klerksdorp and the axle turned sideways or which ever way it wished to turn at that speed. Remember that this new quad was not insured, the trailer was not insured and my wife.... is still mine. Happy hunting.

Link to comment

The ups and downs of it all – Saturday morning, while hunting vespa’s ‘So many shops’ cache, my cell phone went AWOL. I only realised it was missing about an hour after I’d found the cache. Luckily, the phone had been spotted and picked up by an honest gentleman (Andrew) from Rondebosch, who made contact with me through members of my family. I collected the phone from him later in the day and gave him a bottle of liqueur as a ‘thank-you’.

 

Sunday afternoon, while placing a cache, I drop my Venture. It has been dropped before and always came out unscathed, but this time the display got damaged. The unit still works and is still functional as a cache finder, it’s just that the first few millimetres of the screen on the left hand side don’t display properly.

 

Oh well, I was planning to buy a new unit, anyway. Perhaps I was subconsciously trying to hasten the event.

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
×
  • Create New...