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Your BEST Geocaching story EVER


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Interesting request by a Lackey...

 

Is this the start of a Groundspeak effort to publish geocacher's stories?

 

A Groundspeak geocaching magazine, perhaps, online or in print?

 

I hope so! I've always felt that Groundspeak should do that.

 

I will have to dig through my archives and find some of the funny things that have happened on the geotrail, in the meantime I look forward to this thread! <_<

 

The funniest story I have read lately is Sioneva's quest for EarthCaching Platinum status...

 

http://onlinegeocacher.com/issue/real_time...st-for-platinum

Edited by TheAlabamaRambler
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I will preface my story by saying that I am an animal rescuer by trade.

 

Recently I was visiting my parents in West Virginia, they live one state and around 2.5 hours away. Before getting to their house, I wanted to stop at a nearby cache so I could drop off a travel bug that needed to head South. I got it, a memorable but quick cache and dash. As I left GZ and started back down the road, I found a dog on the side of the road, digging around a deer skeleton. With no houses in sight, it was impossible to go door to door with him and so I picked him up and spent the first two hours I was at my parents' house playing phone tag with shelters. While I generally don't prefer going to shelters with animals, I live too far away to have any hope of finding his owners on my own. None of the shelters were open or calling me back so we decided to drive to the county's only shelter facility just as they opened their doors and they took him off my hands. They told me there was a five day stray period before he would be released for adoption, after which I told them I could take him into my rescue program if their shelter became too full.

 

On the fifth day, I received a message in my inbox from the Geocaching website message service. To paraphrase, it read, "Thank you for finding my dog and taking him to the shelter! We were so worried, but the shelter contacted me this morning and he is safely home with us! My husband guessed that you were probably geocaching as folks from out of state rarely end up on our road. I thought I would take a look at the logs for this cache and BINGO! Thank you for helping us get a member of our family home."

 

For me, given what I have chosen to do with my life, my experience made this a most memorable cache.

Edited by starfishsaving
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Tell us the SINGLE best Geocaching experience you've ever heard. It's that ONE story that makes you laugh so hard you fall out of a chair - or instantly start to tear up. Let's hear it!

 

Heck, I'm up early... Might as well write this one down for posterity...

 

There are a couple cachers who basically started the close knit geocaching community here in the Houston area by hosting frequent events at their house. UsMorrows, Sam & Frances, home and neighborhood were known to cachers all around and they are greatly beloved by the cachers that know them....

 

A cacher from Beaumont (who shall forever remain nameless) who had never met them but had lurked the community and felt he knew them decided to play a practical joke on them in the Roy D. Mercer style....

 

He called them up (their names and phone number were posted for the community) and started off nice as can be with a thick Roy D. Mercer southern accent about how he was taking his daughter out caching for the first time to a cache they (UsMorrows) had hidden in the woods near their house... He asked some basic noob questions about how to use her new little yellow etrex and about how to find and log the cache, made some nice conversation and then hung up. Sam & Fran were always helpful and ALWAYS had time for cachers whether they knew them or not. They figured that was that.....

 

About an hour later they get a call back. Frances answered. The cacher with the thick accent accurately discribes the cache and the cache area then goes on to talk about how his 8yo daughter was so excited and delighted with the find all the while totally sucking Fran into the happy story of a first ever find and he mentions that she tripped walking away from the cache and her brand spanky new etrex flew outta her hands and into the bayou next to the cache. Fran registers shock and sorrow and then the guy with the accent askes her if she's gonna cover the loss and replace it. :D:D More shock and dismay and stumbling for what to say on Frances part and she then gets Sam involved.

 

Sam gets on the phone and tries to talk but the cacher with the accent goes on to say that they tried to get the etrex out of the water, but a rabid skunk just then ran out of the woods and attacked and bit both of them and they had to go to the emergency room. :D More shock and stumbling from Sam and Fran as they try to wrestle with the concept of all this happening to a little girl and a man at a cache right down the street from their house. That's when the cacher on the phone tells them he's coming over to get cash or a check to cover $600 in emergency room bills and $89 for the lost etrex. :D:D:o

 

At this point Sam starts to argue and the cacher on the phone says he's coming over to get that $689 or he's gonna take it outta Sam's hide. :o:D:huh: Sam shouts "MISTER, WHY DON'T YOU JUST TRY THAT!!!," and then hangs up.

 

About 2 minutes later there's a knock at the door...... :) and a good laugh was had by all. :rolleyes:

Edited by Snoogans
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I will preface my story by saying that I am an animal rescuer by trade.

 

Recently I was visiting my parents in West Virginia, they live one state and around 2.5 hours away. Before getting to their house, I wanted to stop at a nearby cache so I could drop off a travel bug that needed to head South. I got it, a memorable but quick cache and dash. As I left GZ and started back down the road, I found a dog on the side of the road, digging around a deer skeleton. With no houses in sight, it was impossible to go door to door with him and so I picked him up and spent the first two hours I was at my parents' house playing phone tag with shelters. While I generally don't prefer going to shelters with animals, I live too far away to have any hope of finding his owners on my own. None of the shelters were open or calling me back so we decided to drive to the county's only shelter facility just as they opened their doors and they took him off my hands. They told me there was a five day stray period before he would be released for adoption, after which I told them I could take him into my rescue program if their shelter became too full.

 

On the fifth day, I received a message in my inbox from the Geocaching website message service. To paraphrase, it read, "Thank you for finding my dog and taking him to the shelter! We were so worried, but the shelter contacted me this morning and he is safely home with us! My husband guessed that you were probably geocaching as folks from out of state rarely end up on our road. I thought I would take a look at the logs for this cache and BINGO! Thank you for helping us get a member of our family home."

 

For me, given what I have chosen to do with my life, my experience made this a most memorable cache.

 

Okay...I teared up for this one!! Through the years, we've had many many cats, all rescues, and we're constantly rescuing animals and helping them find homes or their way back home. Any time my son sees an animal without a caretaker he wants to stop and help. We LOVED this story, and hope lots of good karma comes your way!! :rolleyes:

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Actually that's a great story, told via a cache listing and its logs.

 

my understanding from the thread title is that personal stories are expected, or at least something the poster was part of

 

the cache listing is not really a story in my view, it would be a nice story if it was told by the CO :)

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I proposed to my GF in a geocache: Rules of Engagement

 

She didn't think she would like geocaching. But she likes hiking and camping and other outdoor activities. In fact, we met on a running trail and we really become friends while running together early in the morning several times a week.

 

So one day I took her on a hike in a beautiful nature preserve. It was a fairly short loop, maybe a mile and a half total, but there are three geocaches along the trail. By the time we found the third one, she was hooked. So I decided to use a cache to propose.

 

On Valentine's Day we went caching. The weather was beautiful; in fact, it was the first beautiful weather we'd seen in a long time. When we got out of the car she commented that this was near the trails where we used to run together. I just smiled.

 

It didn't take her long to find the cache. She went straight for the logbook, like she always does. Of course it was blank, except for this entry on the first page:

 

e0342ebc-239d-4811-8fd3-89b50abfb96e.jpg

 

When she turned around, I was on one knee with the ring in my hand.

 

Of course she said yes... if she had said no, then this would not be in the category of "BEST Geocaching story EVER," would it?

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Mine is a simple story, not related to any particular cache:

I parked at one of the trailheads in Red Rocks Conservation Area outside Las Vegas, NV, on my way to a few nice caches.

As I set foot on the trail a boy, about 8 years old, looked at me as his parents got equipment out of the car. The kid smiled and said, "I'm going on my first hike, ever!"

That simple statement sent me tumbling back across 50 some years of memories.

I smiled and said nothing but I was thinking, "Dude! I wanna be YOU!"

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OK, So I have an interesting story for you all. A few years ago I was caching for the week in Vermont. You were to go to a walk in only cemetery and read numbers from 2 stones to get coords for the final. When I walked into the clearing I see a fresh dug hole. Now keep in mind that there is no possible way for any equipment to get there. The hole is not long enough to be a grave, BUT it is wide enough as well as deep enough. And it was definitely fresh dug. Now the strange part. One of the stones that we went to find was missing and broken off and down in the freshly dug hole! We could only assume that it was the one since we didn't find it anywhere else. I tried to clean it off with a long stick, but had no luck, and I was NOT going down in there. I have to believe that someone was trying to rob a grave. As I said, this cemetery is a quarter mile bushwhack. Not a frequented place at all. I walked back out to the car to tell my wife what I had found. OK, so I had to try it one more time. Now it's starting to rain. I gather my nerves and get a log and down into the hole I go. The soil kept filling in around the stone as I was trying to read it. All I was thinking was I am going to get buried in a used grave. Dang! I finally give up. I emailed the owner and suggested he contact the local authorities. I did go back last fall and finish this one after it was converted to a traditional.

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There are so many stories of the great places and adventures my wife and I have shared over the last seven years with Geocaching, that it is hard to decide which to tell. We discovered Geocaching shortly after we got married and spent our honeymoon caching in Western Ireland, we have hiked, paddled, flown and driven to caches in 40 states now and there is no question that caching has changed our lives considerably. When we first started I smoked and was 150 pounds heavier, now I am in much better shape and have reconnected to hiking, camping and the environment. My first instinct was to tell of some of the great adventures we have had out in the Everglades, or hiking in the Rockies, exploring the Sierra Nevadas, camping in the Great Smoky Mountains or helping to organize last year's Geowoodstock, but then I realized that my best caching story happened right here in middle Tennessee, and it is really just the prelude to another story that is about to begin.

 

On September 14 of last year, my wife and I had finished doing some yard work and really just wanted to get away for a while, so we loaded up our kayaks and drove about 20 miles to a nearby boat ramp to attempt an as yet unfound cache. We don't normally do the FTF thing, but it was a pretty day and we were really looking forward to some time in our yaks, another hobby we picked up as a direct result of Geocaching's 5 terrain caches. Anyway, we carried the boats down the embankment and hit the water for a really lovely paddle upstream to the cache site. The temperature was in the mid-70's, the wind and current slight, it was a perfect day on the river.

 

When we got near the cache site, we saw that our adventure was just beginning, since the cache was atop a rock column, on top of a rock bluff high above the river. We paddled around till we found a place to land the yaks and began the climb up through thick bushes, vines and poison ivy. Between the thick tree cover and high rocks we were having signal problems trying to locate ground zero, so my wife headed back down to her boat and paddled out into the river to get a clearer view of the sky. With her guidance I continued to climb up till I reached the top of the bluff, where she directed me to the correct stone column. I climbed up the backside and was soon high above the river with the cache in hand. It was a pretty awesome experience to be FTF on a 3.5/5 cache, but that is not the story I came hear to tell.

 

After signing the log, I climbed back down taking an easier route, hopped back in my kayak and we began a lazy paddle back downstream. We laughed at how this was the perfect ending to a perfect weekend, to be riding the current into the sunset with each other. The conversation turned to all of the cool places and great experiences like this our gps had guided us to over the years, particularly our just completed cross country caching roadtrip. This, inevitably, led to discussions of future plans, mapping out the trips we wanted to take over the next year. When we got to the subject of GeoWoodstock, which we had already booked our travel for, she said we were going to have to make some adjustments to our plans. I was a little confused, so I asked her what was wrong. She replied that there was nothing wrong, but that we would have a third person joining us for the trip. I was still confused, but then it hit me, so I said, "If you are saying, what I think you are saying, that is a pretty esoteric way of saying it." She said, "That's what I am saying." Then we both cried a little, in a good way.

 

Our first child, a son, is due to be born the first week of May, 2010. Barring complications, all three of us will be in Seattle for GeoWoodstock 8, followed by a two week caching tour on the way back home. I get the distinct impression that for us, our Geocaching adventure is just beginning.

 

Edited to add a link to the cache with my vague, but revealing log.

Sailor Boy

My Log

Edited by Monkeybrad
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Ok, I'm bored I guess I'll share ours...

 

We were out caching in January in Oklahoma it was about 40 degrees. We were heading right for the cache and then come over a hill to find we have to cross water probably 20 yards wide and 6 inchs of quick moving water with silt and slippery moss all over the bottom. I had not come all this way to not get the cache. So, I take my shoes off, roll my jeans up, and find a good walking stick. My husband thinks I'm crazy and says he's going to watch. It takes me probably 3 minutes to cross then I am SO excited I made it. Then getting to the other side I see I have to go up about 12 feet of muddy embankment. So, after I get to the top I get the cache and I am stoked! By this time their are other families there and I'm sure everyone thinks I am nuts. I start to head back down the embankment, I lose my footing and come sliding all the way back down. My jeans have mud caked on my butt and down my legs! I am horribly embarrassed and my sweet husband is just laughing away...

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There are so many stories of the great places and adventures my wife and I have shared over the last seven years with Geocaching, that it is hard to decide which to tell. We discovered Geocaching shortly after we got married and spent our honeymoon caching in Western Ireland, we have hiked, paddled, flown and driven to caches in 40 states now and there is no question that caching has changed our lives considerably. When we first started I smoked and was 150 pounds heavier, now I am in much better shape and have reconnected to hiking, camping and the environment. My first instinct was to tell of some of the great adventures we have had out in the Everglades, or hiking in the Rockies, exploring the Sierra Nevadas, camping in the Great Smoky Mountains or helping to organize last year's Geowoodstock, but then I realized that my best caching story happened right here in middle Tennessee, and it is really just the prelude to another story that is about to begin.

 

On September 14 of last year, my wife and I had finished doing some yard work and really just wanted to get away for a while, so we loaded up our kayaks and drove about 20 miles to a nearby boat ramp to attempt an as yet unfound cache. We don't normally do the FTF thing, but it was a pretty day and we were really looking forward to some time in our yaks, another hobby we picked up as a direct result of Geocaching's 5 terrain caches. Anyway, we carried the boats down the embankment and hit the water for a really lovely paddle upstream to the cache site. The temperature was in the mid-70's, the wind and current slight, it was a perfect day on the river.

 

When we got near the cache site, we saw that our adventure was just beginning, since the cache was atop a rock column, on top of a rock bluff high above the river. We paddled around till we found a place to land the yaks and began the climb up through thick bushes, vines and poison ivy. Between the thick tree cover and high rocks we were having signal problems trying to locate ground zero, so my wife headed back down to her boat and paddled out into the river to get a clearer view of the sky. With her guidance I continued to climb up till I reached the top of the bluff, where she directed me to the correct stone column. I climbed up the backside and was soon high above the river with the cache in hand. It was a pretty awesome experience to be FTF on a 3.5/5 cache, but that is not the story I came hear to tell.

 

After signing the log, I climbed back down taking an easier route, hopped back in my kayak and we began a lazy paddle back downstream. We laughed at how this was the perfect ending to a perfect weekend, to be riding the current into the sunset with each other. The conversation turned to all of the cool places and great experiences like this our gps had guided us to over the years, particularly our just completed cross country caching roadtrip. This, inevitably, led to discussions of future plans, mapping out the trips we wanted to take over the next year. When we got to the subject of GeoWoodstock, which we had already booked our travel for, she said we were going to have to make some adjustments to our plans. I was a little confused, so I asked her what was wrong. She replied that there was nothing wrong, but that we would have a third person joining us for the trip. I was still confused, but then it hit me, so I said, "If you are saying, what I think you are saying, that is a pretty esoteric way of saying it." She said, "That's what I am saying." Then we both cried a little, in a good way.

 

Our first child, a son, is due to be born the first week of May, 2010. Barring complications, all three of us will be in Seattle for GeoWoodstock 8, followed by a two week caching tour on the way back home. I get the distinct impression that for us, our Geocaching adventure is just beginning.

 

Edited to add a link to the cache with my vague, but revealing log.

Sailor Boy

My Log

Great Story! What a way to find out you'll be a new father...

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I don't know if this is my best geocaching story, but it was pretty funny at the time. Maybe not as the situation was unfolding, but definitely in hindsight.

 

Best Friend Cache in St Louis, MO

 

This was my 150th find. I now know to immediately be truthful and forthcoming when interacting with LEOs. And I really didn't see the signs indicating that the park was closed. Really.

 

Edited to add: I got a little verklempt reading Monkeybrad's story. Congrats you two!

Edited by OzGuff
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Our area has quete a few "canoe caches". We didn't own a canoe or kayak, so these caches went unfound by us for quite a while. Another local cacher noticed that we had found everything except the island and river caches. He thought it would be funny to put out a series of canoe caches titled "Can Cat's Swim?", knowing that we would be unable to access these caches, much less be first to find.

What he didn't know is that we had just purchased a canoe two days earlier. My wife and I got up early and took our new canoe out and found all the caches in the series. I was able to log definitivly that "Yes, cat's can swim". [:D]

 

Sometimes being FTF is not only fun, it's a matter of principle.

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