What are the odds?

[+Jamie Z]

I had the strangest thing happen the other day.

 

I go to the Mountain Dew Midnight Classic here in Memphis, which is a 17-mile bike ride through the city and starts precisely at midnight.

 

Also there (among the 1500 or so participants) were about two dozen fellow employees. I work in a large company, so I know only a few of them.

 

Well, after the ride, I got to talking to a couple of my coworkers, and one guy was telling me about his hiking adventures, and mentions a state park about 75 miles from here. I recalled that I had been there geocaching one time, and told him I was familiar with the park, but I didn't say why.

 

Well.. he's telling me the story about the neat scenery and then says to me "and you'll never guess what we found." In an instant, I knew exactly what he was talking about. I stopped him.

 

"I know what you found. Was it a rusted coffee can?"

 

"How the heck did you know that," he asks. "Did you find it too?"

 

"I have the thing in my closet it my apartment, right now," I tell him.

 

Well... turns out he and his buddies found the thing accidently, opened it up out of curiousity, saw the stash note and figured out it was a game, signed their names and left it where it was.

 

Later, I went to this cache because a recent log said that it needed some repair. I retrieved the container and replaced it with a new one, and brought the old container (and logsheet) home.

 

When I got home after talking with him, I checked the logsheet, and sure enough, there was a note from him.

 

I really found it quite a coincidence that I ran into a guy who has accidently found a cache... and then on top of that, it happens to be a cache that I have at my place.

 

Any similar stories?

 

Jamie

[+travisl]

Not nearly as interesting, but last winter I left a deck of cards in a cache that Hazard had placed.

 

Three months later, I'm searching for a new cache 10 miles away, and coming through the salal bushes, here comes Hazard.

 

We decode the hint, pop open the ammo box, and with Hazard standing next to me, I pull out the deck of cards I had left at his cache three months earlier.

 

"If a boy has enough intelligence, he ought to go into the ministry, except that if when he enters college he is given to carousing, drinking, and wenching, then in that case he should enter the law." - Harvard Student Review, 1796

[+ClayJar]

For BaconQuest II: Water You Loooking For? I drove all the way from Baton Rouge, LA, to a significant distance past Atlanta, GA. I did all the hydrocaches from there back to Atlanta in one day (I found six of the seven).

 

The next day I ended up at the GGA meeting, and while I was there, I managed to pick up a hydrocaching travel bug. Well, I took it the next day and dropped it about 75 miles away on my way home (it was in the opposite direction, but hey).

 

Anyway, when I got home and logged the bug into the cache, it wasn't that much later when I found I had an e-mail waiting. It was the bug's owner... He found it quite humorous that he had driven 75 miles to a meeting with a travel bug, given it to a hydrocacher from three states away, and amazingly, it showed up the next day in a cache on the very lake on which he lives.

 

And the bug came back... the very next day... the bug came back... he thought it was a goner... but the bug came back... it just wouldn't stay away...

[+Mr. Snazz]

This thread reminded me

 

My girlfriend and I were caching in the Salem, Oregon area a few months ago. We both had Geocaching hats on, and I was carrying around a sony mavica digital camera and a huge Garmin StreetPilot GPS.

 

We had just finished visiting a cache and were checking out some of the local "Wildlife" (a small black rabbit) when these other two people show up and start milling around the area. We joked that they might be cachers, but didn't want to have to explain ourselves to strangers. It was getting dark, so we left.

 

Later, we found logs online for the cache, from the two strangers - complaining about *us*, a couple "non cachers" milling around the area. I guess they didn't recognize the logos. Or the gear. Or the out-of-placeness of my inherently geeky persona. Oh well.

[+Mr. Snazz]

This thread reminded me

 

My girlfriend and I were caching in the Salem, Oregon area a few months ago. We both had Geocaching hats on, and I was carrying around a sony mavica digital camera and a huge Garmin StreetPilot GPS.

 

We had just finished visiting a cache and were checking out some of the local "Wildlife" (a small black rabbit) when these other two people show up and start milling around the area. We joked that they might be cachers, but didn't want to have to explain ourselves to strangers. It was getting dark, so we left.

 

Later, we found logs online for the cache, from the two strangers - complaining about *us*, a couple "non cachers" milling around the area. I guess they didn't recognize the logos. Or the gear. Or the out-of-placeness of my inherently geeky persona. Oh well.

[glynnfam]

I had a strange coincidence happen....

 

I live in the SF Bay area, and have many cousins in North Dakota - they all hunt, so I figured they'd have GPS units. I contacted a cousin that lives in an area that has several geocaches (Bismarck) and told him about geocaching and said that I wanted to deploy a travel bug from CA to get to him in ND.

 

I found the perfect spot - a little known trail, practically in my own backyard. Only about a mile long, and a dead-end. I ordered my travel bug and began gathering items to create a new cache to place at the end of this trail and start my travel bug off.

 

Guess what. Before I got my act together, another local geocacher placed a cache at the end of this trail and in it, she placed a Sacagawea coin travel bug that was to find its way to Bismarck ND twilight zone music>. Freaky.