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Almost peed in pants while Geocaching


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We were finishing up a day of caching when the sun had set and we had 2 more caches we planed on doing. We parked at a parks parking lot (it was totally dark) and went about our search using flashlights. We found the cache, signed to log, replaced the cache and headed back to the geomobile. As we were putting our CITO bags in the trash can near our car, a bike rider zoomed past us, scared us and the biker. The biker almost ran into a fence post. My hubby yelled "oh Sh*T" , and he scared me by yelling , I almost peed me pants. Has anyone out there had something happen to scare them while caching? Do tell!

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I was out looking for a cache called wild life refuge. htis was interesting. as i live in the desert of california i am not expecting this sort of animal. i look right where it should be I jumped six feet in the air. I came accross a gosh darnned porcupine! too bad it was the cache its self. then I felt really retarded having my adrenaline pumping for a hunk of plastic. then i almost died of laughter. :angry::angry:

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I once scared the hell out of another geocacher.

Was out at the lake after dark and decided to walk over to a near by geocache of ours with my son.

 

Once we got there we seen another geocachers truck in the area.

I knew who it was and what he was doing. My son and I waited next to his truck.

 

Watched him coming back up the trail with his week little flashlight.

 

When he got closer I light him up with one of my Surefire lights and asked in a very loud voice, "what the hell you doing there!".

 

lol....

 

Then I said in my normal voice, "you out geocaching?".

 

By then he knew it was me and said I scared the hell out of him.

Me and my son got a good laugh out of it. :laughing:

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My son found an ammo cache container in the bottom of a tree's root system. We both bent down to pull it out, and a chipmunk was hiding behind it. Jumped right between us and scared the crap out of us. Definately learned a lesson that day, dig around with the hiking stick first :laughing:

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I was out looking for a night cache in the woods near here. Just me and the dogs.

 

While using the flashlight to try and pick out the next reflector, I picked out two huge yellow eyes in the brush just ahead of me.

 

My first thought was "where are the dogs". I thought they were behind me. I just froze in place for what seemed like a long time, but was really only a few seconds.

 

Turned out it was one of my dogs! :laughing::laughing: There are a lot of bike trails back in there, and the dogs had got on a parallel trail, and ahead of me, without my seeing them.

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A couple encounters with these guys have scared me pretty good . . . :laughing:

 

b46b9d4a-d60f-4ab7-8307-8582dd93c8a8.jpg

I'll second the motion on that. I've had many encounters with rattlesnakes. But the one that sticks in my head is when a caching buddy of mine got a large rattler really pissed. It freaked us all out when it suddenly popped up his head and ratttled super loud. It would have stuck him had he not quickly jumped straight back out of harm's way. I was right behind him when it happened and shuddered at the thought of whether or not I would have jumped that quickly if I had been in front. :laughing: What I do know is that if you ever do get bit, you need to call 911 ASAP, unless you want permanent damage to the area that was bitten. They'll send in helicopters if need be... :laughing:
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Most scared I've ever been on a hunt was when I was out with my sis and bro-in-law and it was dusk. We were walking back down the trail towards the car when we heard something ahead of us. Then we heard more than saw a large animal come screaming right at us. As it reached us at high speed it started barking and it turned out to be an aggressive (but ultimately safe) dog with its owner walking behind it. Tough to capture the abject terror here in words but it took about 10 minutes before my heart stopped jackhammering. Good doggie.

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if you understand the function of a moose wallow, you will better comprehend my alarm.

 

in season, the bull will scrape out a hollow and he will urinate in it. he will mix up the mud well and he will wait. he hopes that a cow and usually her yearling calf will come by, and if they accept his leadership, they will roll in it.

 

one afternoon i was hunting a cache called "beaver meadow". i had come up on the wrong trail and decided to bushwhack two and a half miles on rough terrain. at some point i was bleeding from a puncture wound, standing calf-deep in moose urine, which was bad enough, but then the host appeared. i was not what he had in mind and he was very disappointed.

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I'll second the motion on that. I've had many encounters with rattlesnakes. But the one that sticks in my head is when a caching buddy of mine got a large rattler really pissed. It freaked us all out when it suddenly popped up his head and ratttled super loud. It would have stuck him had he not quickly jumped straight back out of harm's way. I was right behind him when it happened and shuddered at the thought of whether or not I would have jumped that quickly if I had been in front. :laughing: What I do know is that if you ever do get bit, you need to call 911 ASAP, unless you want permanent damage to the area that was bitten. They'll send in helicopters if need be... :laughing:

 

Third. I figure I must have stepped right over one without even seeing it. My wife was behind me and stopped within inches of it, with quite a bug-eyed look on her face. Very exciting. It was cocked and ready, but it didn't strike.

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My wife had a pee test for her job last week. She tried to go but was empty. After telling me i just told her to sneeze. :laughing:

 

I take it your wife doesn't read the forums much.

 

i had one of those sneezes a few weeks ago. i am going to have to start wearing underwear...

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Chicken and i found a cache near here that gave me a pretty good scare. It was an ordinary ammocan placed in an abandoned armadillo hole. No problem except that when i pulled it out, a snake came out with it. That thing had mouth open wide with fangs showing and i about did a backflip trying to get away. Half to admit that i let out a pretty good yelp about that same time too.

 

What's bad, is that it was a fake rubber snake that the cache owner tied to the ammocan. He got me good, and i'm sure a few others too! :laughing:

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so far just a few run-ins with rattlesnakes. actually i dislike all snakes, didn't mean to single any one kind out. i just give them a wide area unless they get aggressive in which they end up dead. man i dislike snakes!

 

ever been bitten? a friend of mine was recently telling her kid that garter snakes don't bite. they do. they bite hard, and it hurts. the bite is similar to a turtle's bite, and it bleeds.

 

and yet somehow i like turtles and snakes. my sister thinks it's because i'm emotionally so much like them.

 

pfft.

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I was coming out onto the trail after finding a cache and looked and the next one was only .2 miles away, when I glanced up from my GPSr I was a coyote running...It was actually running straight away from me, but for an instant I thought it was running towards me.

And then the time a bobcat crossed the trail in front of me. What was scary about that was that I didn't know what bobcats do when they encoutner humans. Luckily it just glanced at me and kind of walked away like I was no big deal.

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My wife had a pee test for her job last week. She tried to go but was empty. After telling me i just told her to sneeze. :laughing:

 

I take it your wife doesn't read the forums much.

 

i had one of those sneezes a few weeks ago. i am going to have to start wearing underwear...

:laughing: I once had a guy tell me he had to be careful how much coffee he drank, because he didn't want to overload his Depends. Sometimes such openness is refreshing. We're all human.

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so far just a few run-ins with rattlesnakes. actually i dislike all snakes, didn't mean to single any one kind out. i just give them a wide area unless they get aggressive in which they end up dead. man i dislike snakes!

 

ever been bitten? a friend of mine was recently telling her kid that garter snakes don't bite. they do. they bite hard, and it hurts. the bite is similar to a turtle's bite, and it bleeds.

 

and yet somehow i like turtles and snakes. my sister thinks it's because i'm emotionally so much like them.

 

pfft.

 

Garter snakes are kinda cute but they do like to bite. We encountered one hidng underneath a cache while out with my Mom one time. She is like me and doesn't mind snakes at all and she went to pick it up when she saw it. Tried to stop her but i was too late and it took a little bite. Not sure where the snake ended up but i do know that it went flying farther than it could ever imagine. She knows better now and we still laugh about that.

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I am quite arachnophobic. Spiders just don't make me happy. The other day while out hunting a short two stage multi in a near by park, I picked the wrong spot to get off trail. About 10 feet in, I felt the all too familiar feeling of spider webs. I of course take a step back to avoid getting further tangled, and I saw the little bugger who owned the thing. He was only about a centimeter across, but he had a shell that would put a crab to shame. I did the 'GET IT THE HECK OFF OF ME!' dance, and proceeded to stab myself in the hand with my pen. Gave my friend quite a laugh too. Turns out we got off trail about 25 feet too late.

 

edited for spelling.

Edited by Shakedown.dave
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there is one thing that always scares me when we go caching.

 

my girlfriend and I like the views from high places, we LOVE caches which are at the top of overlooks.

 

She is fearless of heights. I am not.

 

To clarify, it's not an irrational fear, I've had mountaineering training in my past, and was moderately accomplished at rock climbing and rappelling; including the free fall rappel from a helicopter skid back in ROTC training.... but I find it much different when I'm dealing with unstable limestone and have no safety rope to rely on, I always get nervous.

 

we had to climb to the top of this cliff for kitchen cove cache.

5c184274-1957-498f-942d-c6b64b15d302.jpg

 

I was climbing one-handed since I was carrying a PDA, digital camera, and GPSr. Made it to the top, but was pretty frightened a few times during the ascent. This is not stable rock, and climbing one-handed with no rope was a bit nerve wracking for me.

 

e8ed61bd-d64d-40d1-a09e-231aaec1ce12.jpg

 

my girlfriend at the edge of the top... she'd be right on the edge if I wasn't yelling to her to stay away from the edge. notice where I'm taking the picture from... way back. :laughing: but the adrenaline rush was great, and I had a blast. Once at the top we continued to another cache, and ended up stuck farther down the bluff at the top of another large cliff which we could not possibly scale down... Everywhere we tried to find a path down, we found ourselves looking over the edge of large drop offs... and it was getting dark. That's a different kind of fear that's not quite so fun.

 

and after all of that, it was a DNF. we went back a short while later after reading the post from the next cachers about heir near death experience during their climb, and the second time we got it. :laughing:

 

We're going back to another cache tomorrow that we went to last year and also had a scary climb. last time we ended up scaling another cliff because we didn't know there was an "easy way" ...we're going to go the hard way again tomorrow because my gf loves it. I really do love it too, though I'm scared spitless each time during the climb, and while we are at the top looking over the edge at certain death if we trip, slip, or fall.

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there is one thing that always scares me when we go caching.

 

my girlfriend and I like the views from high places, we LOVE caches which are at the top of overlooks.

 

She is fearless of heights. I am not.

 

To clarify, it's not an irrational fear, I've had mountaineering training in my past, and was moderately accomplished at rock climbing and rappelling; including the free fall rappel from a helicopter skid back in ROTC training.... but I find it much different when I'm dealing with unstable limestone and have no safety rope to rely on, I always get nervous.

 

we had to climb to the top of this cliff for kitchen cove cache.

5c184274-1957-498f-942d-c6b64b15d302.jpg

 

I was climbing one-handed since I was carrying a PDA, digital camera, and GPSr. Made it to the top, but was pretty frightened a few times during the ascent. This is not stable rock, and climbing one-handed with no rope was a bit nerve wracking for me.

 

e8ed61bd-d64d-40d1-a09e-231aaec1ce12.jpg

 

my girlfriend at the edge of the top... she'd be right on the edge if I wasn't yelling to her to stay away from the edge. notice where I'm taking the picture from... way back. :laughing: but the adrenaline rush was great, and I had a blast. Once at the top we continued to another cache, and ended up stuck farther down the bluff at the top of another large cliff which we could not possibly scale down... Everywhere we tried to find a path down, we found ourselves looking over the edge of large drop offs... and it was getting dark. That's a different kind of fear that's not quite so fun.

 

and after all of that, it was a DNF. we went back a short while later after reading the post from the next cachers about heir near death experience during their climb, and the second time we got it. :laughing:

 

We're going back to another cache tomorrow that we went to last year and also had a scary climb. last time we ended up scaling another cliff because we didn't know there was an "easy way" ...we're going to go the hard way again tomorrow because my gf loves it. I really do love it too, though I'm scared spitless each time during the climb, and while we are at the top looking over the edge at certain death if we trip, slip, or fall.

Cool photos! I used to live in Eau Claire. If you like heights and rock climbing you gotta visit Moab, Utah. I never had a fear of heights until I went there and stood on the edge of a 3000' cliff and then looked down. :laughing:
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A couple encounters with these guys have scared me pretty good . . . :laughing:

 

b46b9d4a-d60f-4ab7-8307-8582dd93c8a8.jpg

I'll second the motion on that. I've had many encounters with rattlesnakes. But the one that sticks in my head is when a caching buddy of mine got a large rattler really pissed. It freaked us all out when it suddenly popped up his head and ratttled super loud. It would have stuck him had he not quickly jumped straight back out of harm's way. I was right behind him when it happened and shuddered at the thought of whether or not I would have jumped that quickly if I had been in front. :laughing: What I do know is that if you ever do get bit, you need to call 911 ASAP, unless you want permanent damage to the area that was bitten. They'll send in helicopters if need be... :laughing:

And then they fly you to a ER and give you CroFab ( I am a RN, I work in a ER) that cost about $30,000 for the average weight person. YIKES!

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Yup, I've had some "Try not to scream like a little girl" moments. One time, while doing maintenance on a night cache, I got scared of a cow. Yeah, that's not a typo. A cow. Mr BottomOfTheFoodChain himself, had me sweatin' bullets and backing away. :laughing: Earlier in the year, I accompanied a group through that same cache and the lead guy stepped on a wild hog. That woke us all up. While setting up another night cache, I got pretty tired, and wasn't paying attention to details. As I was attaching a reflector to a tree, I felt this repeated thumping on my foot. I looked down and saw a pygmy rattler that I had stepped on going to town on my snake boots. :laughing:

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:laughing::laughing:

I was out night caching using a AA minimag flashlight IN THE WOODS. I spooked a deer that was about 10 feet away from me. That will get your attention really quick.

Heh...ditto on that.

 

The only better ones are Partridge.I don't care how many times you've been in the woods and know where they'll be.To say they explode from their hiding spots is an understatement. :laughing::laughing: Dang things get me EVERY time.I've yet to see how someone could shoot one from the spots I've seen em' fly (burst/explode) out of.

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if you understand the function of a moose wallow, you will better comprehend my alarm.

 

in season, the bull will scrape out a hollow and he will urinate in it. he will mix up the mud well and he will wait. he hopes that a cow and usually her yearling calf will come by, and if they accept his leadership, they will roll in it.

 

one afternoon i was hunting a cache called "beaver meadow". i had come up on the wrong trail and decided to bushwhack two and a half miles on rough terrain. at some point i was bleeding from a puncture wound, standing calf-deep in moose urine, which was bad enough, but then the host appeared. i was not what he had in mind and he was very disappointed.

Um...when I get my moose tag...I might have to send you a PM for coords...hmmm :laughing: :laughing:

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Yup, I've had some "Try not to scream like a little girl" moments. One time, while doing maintenance on a night cache, I got scared of a cow. Yeah, that's not a typo. A cow. Mr BottomOfTheFoodChain himself, had me sweatin' bullets and backing away. :laughing: Earlier in the year, I accompanied a group through that same cache and the lead guy stepped on a wild hog. That woke us all up. While setting up another night cache, I got pretty tired, and wasn't paying attention to details. As I was attaching a reflector to a tree, I felt this repeated thumping on my foot. I looked down and saw a pygmy rattler that I had stepped on going to town on my snake boots. :laughing:

 

I may have posted this before but i was doing the finishing touches on a night cache out in the woods when all of a sudden, i heard a loud noise and saw these reflecting from my led light.

 

0499932a-e80c-4b3c-a072-16d402310ccf.jpg

 

It definitely startled me for a second but i quickly realized that it was just a small herd of cattle checking out what i was doing..

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Night caching alone, I drove up a very desolate nearly unmaintained road that leads to the locked up gate of an abandoned military installation. It's in a salt marsh so there were lots of ambient "animal noises" all around. I hopped the guardrail went down a slight embankment grabbed the ammo can and took it back to a guardrail post to open it. It unlatched and I had to give it a bit of a jerk to get the lid open when from above my head in a nearby tree comes a big white owl who swoops right over my head and then off into the darkness. When I reached in I also found some smart-guy had left a "noisemaker" inside the cache that also made animal noises.

That was one big bird in one spooky place.

 

DCC

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Yup, I've had some "Try not to scream like a little girl" moments. One time, while doing maintenance on a night cache, I got scared of a cow. Yeah, that's not a typo. A cow. Mr BottomOfTheFoodChain himself, had me sweatin' bullets and backing away. :laughing: Earlier in the year, I accompanied a group through that same cache and the lead guy stepped on a wild hog. That woke us all up. While setting up another night cache, I got pretty tired, and wasn't paying attention to details. As I was attaching a reflector to a tree, I felt this repeated thumping on my foot. I looked down and saw a pygmy rattler that I had stepped on going to town on my snake boots. :laughing:

 

i have never been able to "scream like a little girl", despite several years spent AS a little girl.

 

blast.

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trust me on this folks...

 

when you have Irritable Bowel, a little pee is nothing. ;)

 

i don't have irritable bowel, but i do know what it's like to be late for work because i've filled my pants first thing in the morning. and people think the hand tremor is bad.

 

kind of unrelated to the unrelated thing: today i farted in tune. high do, low do, sol. did you know that at the end of the nineteenth century you used to be able to make a very nice living as a professional "fartist"? i'm not kidding. these people would honk out some tunes and perform some other stunts, i'm not sure what. classy stuff. people paid top dollar to see hear it.

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Well the doctor wants to hope he can go back in time and forget the time "Alice" was behind my car in MB that night....

 

Anyways...the doctor and I are out caching in a parking lot for a simple park-n-grab...problem is the area where the cache is hidden is on a fence that backs up to a neighborhood so we are looking, all of a sudden we hear a door open and a dog starts going @#$%^&*() nuts barking his/her head off and I was GONE!!!!!!!!!

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....and the part that was left out was that he ran like a little girl (no insult to the little girls, I have one myself) and was in the car before he even thought to warn me.

 

LOL

 

(MY little girl wouldn't have run off and left her cache partner.)

Edited by DoctorWho
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Black bears, in general. The ones that stand there and look at you. The ones that run away make a lot of noise, and can be quite scary, but at least they aren't staring at you. Almost stepped on one once. I missed him by about four feet. (Of course, I wasn't geocaching on that trip.) S/he bushwhacked through the mountain laurel which must have hurt!) I couldn't move for about fifteen minutes!

What did I find yesterday? A Ziplock bag of condoms, with an offer for a free HIV test. Well, I didn't open the bag, but it was a strange thing to find. And, no, it wasn't the cache.

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Well...

 

The wife and I were out looking to get FTF on a cache. There was one early on on the trail we stopped to get, and as we were moving on, I spotted a black bear 75' down the trail. :P Concerned more about what our dog would do, I simply turned around, said "Bear," and started walking out. Susan (wife) and Molly (dog) followed, and as I looked back, I saw the bear had turned and was walking away, too.

 

Next day, I decided to return & get that cache. I came earlier in the day (day 1 was 1 hour before dusk) and was singing & whistling all the way in. About 200 feet from the cache I start hearing a rustling in the brush, which quickly turned to crashing! The bear broke into the clearing and stopped, just yards away from me. :P I was shouting and waving my trekking pole, trying to make the bear aware I was there. We just stared at each other for a minute, me just talking to the bear ("You aren't hungry now, are you? Why don't you go on back? C'mon now, don't make me scream like a little girl...") It backed off into the woods, never really taking its eyes off me, sitting down 10 yards back in the woods. I started backing out until I couldn't see him (her?) anymore, then started walking purposefully back to the car. All the way out, I swear I could hear the bear following from a distance... :)

 

:D As if this hadn't been enough, I returned the next morning, tied my keys to my pole to make even more noise, and set out again... singing songs like "The Other Day, I Saw a Bear"... On the way in, I see motion out of the corner of my eye! I jumped, spun my pole into a defensive stance & faced... a chipmunk just off the trail. :D Ran into a couple other small critters, with much of the same reaction, but luckily no more bear.

 

Got FTF, too... ;) (I think anyone watching that cache & reading my DNF logs was a little too smart to try it...)

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i have never been able to "scream like a little girl", despite several years spent AS a little girl.

My last successful girly scream involved an urban small. My GPSr brought me to an antique 3 story staircase on the exterior of a building. The staircase had a big piece of I-beam steel running it's entire length, just an inch or so away from the building. I'm thinking the cache is magnetized inside this I-beam, so as I'm ascending, I'm lightly running my hand along the gap. I'm almost to the top when my fingers brush something. Whoo Hoo!! I made the grab, and determined rather kwickly that I was holding an active hornet's nest, not a cache. The hornets were not pleased. :D

 

To add insult to injury, once we regrouped, we located the cache, magnetized to the underside of the top landing. I had to ascend back through all those wasps to get it. :D

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Well, my favorite scary moment was when I was racing for an FTF one evening. I parked at the posted coords, and followed a sidewalk leading between some houses. It was pitch-black already, so I was using my flashlight. As I rounded a bend in the walkway, I realized that I was now walking along the edge of the cemetary. There was a 4 foot chainlink fence separating the sidewalk from the cemetary grounds.

 

When I got to gz, the numbers were pointing into the cemetary property, so I shone my light over the fence. There was nowhere to hide a cache on that side though...in fact, there were chairs all set out, and an open hole that I assumed was for a burial the next morning. I went to the nearest bush on my side of the fence, and fortunately found the cache rather quickly. As I was replacing the container, I spotted some headlights coming up the road inside the cemetary. I figured they probably had security watching over the place since the chairs and tents were all set up. I decided to try to get out of there and avoid any questions.

 

I tried to high-tail it up the path to get out of sight, but they got there too quickly. I ducked into some bushes, and figured I would watch them search to make sure I hadn't compromised the cache. They parked the car, and both doors opened immediately. One flashlight headed toward where I had been searching for the cache, and the other one came right for me. I figured I must have stood out in their headlights, so it was time to come clean. As the flashlight coming toward me got within about 15 feet, I stood up, and said, "I guess you are wondering what I am doing here?"

 

Well, as it turns out, they weren't security. They were a husband and wife caching team trying to get FTF! :D

 

Well, when I popped out of the bushes, she was too scared to make a noise! She just stood there with her mouth open gaping at me. He on the other hand clutched his chest and let out a bellow to wake the dead!

 

I haven't laughed so hard in a long time! I bought them a beer at the next event as a token of my gratitude for the chuckle.

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There have been several instances where I got scared while caching. I can't really remember the others in detail, but lemme tell ya what happened today.

My hubby was at work, and I was bored so I decided to get hit a few caches. I figured...easy peasy. I'd get ones that didn't involve hiking into woods or anything. The first cache, fast and easy. Very nice.

The second cache...weeeeeeeeell.....

 

I got there, sat in my truck for a bit trying to get my cam on my phone to work. Then, I got it and got out. I took pics of the ducks. I walked across a bridge to a little island. I start my hunt here. I noticed something under the bridge that I thought might could be it. I picked it up as I stepped down the bank to stand by the water. I looked up, and under the bridge was a freakin snake. We kinda stared at each other for a sec, then he started moving and so did I. I had to climb/step up the bank and figure out how to get across the bridge being guarded by the "keeper of the cache." I figured that's one DNF that i MIGHT go try to get later, but I definitely won't be alone nor will I be without my snake equipment.

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