It's a small world!

[bunnylady]

Yesterday, we went to the Bay Area Renaissance Festival in Tampa, FL(We go every year; dress up and everything!). This year we were meeting up with friends outside the main gate, and parking was a nightmare, so we were hanging around for quite awhile. As often happens, we struck up a conversation with another family standing nearby who was also waiting for someone. Never met them before; they were just fun to talk to. Then they mentioned that they were Geocachers! (GodinDraak, actually) No wonder they were such cool people!

Of course, we had even more to talk about while we waited!

 

I understand meeting fellow cachers at events, or on the trail, but is it common to stumble on one like this?

I just thought it was really cool!

[+BlueDeuce]

A while back I got stopped by a security guard when leaving a mall. Turns out he recognized my local geoclub T-shirt and wanted to introduce himself as a fellow cacher.

 

Whew!

[+SgtSue]

This past fall I was in Europe for a military exercise. We had a day off and were out seeing the sights among which was the Bad Durkheim wine fest. Shortly after sitting down I saw a group of Americans sitting down and then one of them pointed at me. Looking closer he was wearing the blue “Bliss” geocaching t-shirt, then I remember so was I. I went over and spoke to him. He was “Moving Glass” from Chicago and there visiting military family members. Both of us were traveling with muggles and only managed a few caches each – one of which we both found on the same day.

[+Isonzo Karst]

The organizer for the festival you attended is a geocacher, and I'd bet there were at least a dozen other cachers in attendance. Some years there's a mini caching meet and greet conducted within the festival.

[+Vinny & Sue Team]

Yes, this has happened several times for me. One tale, which I have recounted in the past somewhere on this forum, happened almost a year ago. I had been attending a breakfast geo-event in Hagerstown, MD, and after the event I detoured down to the MD/WV border to visit an organic farmer who is a friend and consulting client; he had asked me to make a quick consulting visit that day and was expecting me. After I parked in the driveway of his farm, a young female farm employee approached me to ask me who I was and what I wanted, and I explained my mission. She told me that Allan (the farmer) was working in a nearby field and offered to walk with me to find him. As we walked, she looked at the Psycho Urban Cache imprinted T-shirt which I was wearing, and asked if I was a geocacher. I replied that yes, I was... She told me that her parents lived several hundred miles away, and that her dad was an active geocacher, and that she had gone geocaching with him about fifty times, and that she had even transported a TB for him to Antarctica when she had gotten a temporary job at McMurdo Base a year earlier. Small world!

 

More recently, I spent about a week in Los Angeles on a combined consulting and personal trip. At one point, I was sitting talking with a non-geocacher friend of mine who is an LA-based artist, and her cell phone rang. It turned out that the caller was her brother, who also lives in the LA-area, and he told her that he had gotten into geocaching about two weeks earlier, and that he had already grown bored with most urban caches and so had decided to focus largely on extreme terrain caches from that point on. At that moment, my friend told him that she was sitting with me and that my main focus within the geo world is extreme geocaching. Again, what a small world! Incidentally, my non-geocacher artist friend and I walked up to the Santa Monica Pier webcam cache later that day and I called Sue back home, who took a screenshot from the webcam image of the two of us standing near the Pier entrance, so that we could claim a find on the webcam cache.

[Clan Riffster]

Isn't it a rule that any time a large gathering of eccentrics occurs at least 10% of the total will be geocachers?

[+jave042]

I'm still waiting to meet a fellow geocacher at a bar.

[+emurock]

I'm still waiting to meet a fellow geocacher at a bar.

[+The Leprechauns]

A year ago I started attending a large church near my home. One day, pulling up at the traffic light to turn left into the church campus, I found myself behind another SUV with the same Geocaching.com license plate frame. I parked nearby, said "nice license plate, I've got one just like it." We walked in together and shared geocaching stories until the worship service started.

 

That reminds me, I need to get permission for the cache I want to hide on the church property...

[+tozainamboku]

That reminds me, I need to get permission for the cache I want to hide on the church property...

On church property you can assume adequate permission. If you are wrong, you can always be forgiven.

Edited March 19, 2007 by tozainamboku

[+lals cache]

We haven't met anyone yet, but I have followed some around. We were a a day behind someone who was finding caches. We found some yesterday signed the day before by a fellow geocacher.

[+frivlas]

About a month after school started I was walking back to my Blazer after dropping off the kids when one of the other mothers called out "OH....That's your truck?!" Turns out she had recognized the Tech/Nature=caching sticker in my back window. She had discovered geocaching over the summer....now if I could just get her to go caching with me!

[crawil]

Not long after we got involved in geocaching, I was talking to some friends at church one day about mapping programs and he said that he was very familiar with many of them. It turns out that they were about 600 finds ahead of us at that point. We call on each other for lifelines now!

[+wesleykey]

Yesterday, we went to the Bay Area Renaissance Festival in Tampa, FL

 

So, did they call it BARF for short?

[+Monkeybrad]

This happened to me last night. After a long weekedn of caching out of town, my wife and I stopped for dinner as we neared home. As I was standing at Cracker Barrel waiting for a table when a guy walked up and asked what my handle was. I was a little taken aback, but I introduced myself and we spoke for a few minutes, turns out he was visiting middle Tennessee from Oklahoma. It was only after he left that I realized I was wearing my Groundspeak jacket with the gc logo on it. Our small world is getting smaller.

[+wimseyguy]

Nah, he just recognized your picture from the geo-bingo game at GW4.

[+StarBrand]

Once I ran into a guy at a restaurant reading a rite-in-rain geocaching logbook. He had just started Geocaching and took the logbook temporarily to read the logs (he put it back later that day). We had a brief but nice conversation. Another time we overheard a couple at the next table saying how "cool" that StarBrand cache was - made for a nice introduction. They were shocked that I was sitting right next to them. We enjoyed talking for a few hours but I can't remember thier caching names.

[+Renegade Knight]

Outside of caching I keep bumping into people who know a cacher but who never can remember their name.

[+ThreeRushkateers]

I have a cache that I use as extra credit for my chemistry classes. This year I had a student whose family caches and she was the first one in the class to locate the cache! She and I didn't realize the other was a cacher until she went online and looked up the extra credit assignment.