coincidences while geocaching

[+Aer72]

I want to hear about coincidences while geocaching.

My coincedental experience is one of my TBs was in Bath City and while meeting up with a friend in Bath I realised we were 2.2km away from the cache it was listed in!

[+Korichnovui]

I randomly found a geocoin of a sheep. It's mission was to "find other 4-legged creatures that produce wool."

The crazy thing was, I was literally going to drive over 600 miles away, across several states, to visit my grandpa, who helps his neighbors take care of their flock of sheep during spring break, when all the baby lambs are being born. I was leaving on that trip THAT VERY SAME DAY.

---

I was going for a micro cache with a plastic beetle attached as camouflage, hidden in a bush in a public park. The cache description wanted you to post in your log what your favorite song was from The Beatles. As I walked back to my car, I decided (even though it isn't quite a Beatles song) that I was going to choose Live and Let Die, by Paul McCartney.

I got in my car and turned it on. THAT WAS THE SONG PLAYING ON THE RADIO!!

Edited May 19, 2018 by Korichnovui

[+Harry Dolphin]

Had that happen once.  Went for a cache by a ball field named Sultan of Swing.  Got back in the car and the radio was playing Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits.  I'd never heard that song before.

[+hukilaulau]

5 hours ago, Korichnovui said:

I randomly found a geocoin of a sheep. It's mission was to "find other 4-legged creatures that produce wool."

The crazy thing was, I was literally going to drive over 600 miles away, across several states, to visit my grandpa, who helps his neighbors take care of their flock of sheep during spring break, when all the baby lambs are being born. I was leaving on that trip THAT VERY SAME DAY.

---

I was going for a micro cache with a plastic beetle attached as camouflage, hidden in a bush in a public park. The cache description wanted you to post in your log what your favorite song was from The Beatles. As I walked back to my car, I decided (even though it isn't quite a Beatles song) that I was going to choose Live and Let Die, by Paul McCartney.

I got in my car and turned it on. THAT WAS THE SONG PLAYING ON THE RADIO!!

That song is ALWAYS playing on the radio!

[+CAVinoGal]

I live in Northern California, and have been releasing travel bugs with wine corks attached.  In April my husband and I were visting our son and daughter in law in Arizona, and were headed to a geocaching event since we are all geocachers.  On the drive there, I got a notification that one of my wine cork TB's had been dropped in the very event that we were headed to!  I got to meet the dropper and the retriever!

[+barefootjeff]

Back in early 2015, a multi in a remote cliff-top location in the Watagan Mountains was published and, after 3 weeks with no activity, I decided to go for the long drive up there to have a shot at FTF. After leaving my geomobile some 2.5km from the listed coordinates and walking the rest of the way, I'd reached the waypoint, made the calculation and was heading off towards GZ when I heard an approaching 4WD vehicle. It turned out to be the CO who was showing another cacher and a couple of their muggle friends his unfound cache. After asking me where I was going, I showed him my calculations and it turned out there was an error in his formula for the coordinates, so if we hadn't bumped into each other it would've been a rather frustrating DNF for me instead of the shared FTF.

[+J Grouchy]

Nothing amazing for me, though way back when I started geocaching, my family and I were in a local park at the playground.  While we were there, I got an email that a new cache had published AT that very park.  All I had to do was walk about four or five hundred feet and make the grab.  That was my very first FTF.

[+Stakmaster]

One "coincidence" I guess happened the other day. I had just started walking on a trail to geocache and a car pulled up to mine and parked. A sheriff came out, greeted me, flashed his badge and asked what I was doing. I said I was geocaching and asked if he knew what that was and he replied that he did. He explained that 2 kids had skipped school that day and were last seen on that trail and was wondering if I had seen anyone on the trail. He also said that one of them was wearing a backpack (so was I, maybe be thought I was one of them?) I told him that I had just arrived and hadn't been on the trail yet, but would call the police if I saw anyone. He thanked me and I went on the trail.

 

Then, after geocaching for an hour or so, I returned to my car and a different sheriff was there, flashed his badge, and asked me the same questions. I told him that I had already spoken to a police officer about an hour earlier who asked me the same things, and that I hadn't seen anyone since then. I went home and saw online that the two kids were found later that day. I was the only person on that trail, and you're definitely not expecting to be flashed a police badge while just walking around geocaching in the middle of nowhere, least of all twice. Glad everything worked out, though!

Edited May 21, 2018 by Stakmaster

[+Viajero Perdido]

Those are some cool coincidences!

 

Here's mine.  A few weeks ago I took a hike in a local wilderness to 1) maintain a cache, 2) find my last unfound, and 3) look for a buddy's Garmin that he lost somewhere out there.  It was already 8 days since he lost it, and instead of going back to look (he said he hated it), he simply bought a new one.  But he told me roughly where I could look, and wished me luck.

 

At the very same instant, two things happened:  I laid eyes on the Garmin, and the phone rang.

 

I found it!  Like two seconds ago!  Literally!

 

(I literally never misuse the word "literally".)

 

I hadn't even had a moment to reach over and grab it, oops, the phone's ringing.

 

Edited May 21, 2018 by Viajero Perdido

[+BulldogBlitz]

a few years ago we were living in texas.  released a TB with no goal of "return to us".  life happened.  we moved to within about 10 miles of Modoc Stash (GCF4) .  we were barely here a month and someone dropped our TB in the cache so it went from "get to it in the next couple of months" to "get to it this afternoon". 

[+colleda]

We had one yesterday. We were in Rotthenberg, Germany, on a tour, and picking up any stray smilies lurking but we lucked out due to a huge festival and thousands of people everywhere. It was a day of commemoration of the end of the Thirty Years war. Anyhoo, we were walking down the strasse when we spotted a beautiful old arch and clock tower. I snapped a picture of and recognised that it was the subject of a jigsaw puzzle we completed last year. 

[+The Leprechauns]

Years ago, I took my daughter on the standard "college visit tour."  It was the one long distance trip where we didn't worry about finding geocaches.  Finding the right college was a bit more important!

 

So, we're visiting the college that she eventually wound up attending, and my daughter wanted to have lunch with a freshman who graduated from the same high school.  This left me with 90 minutes to kill.  So, I fired up my smartphone, with no advance preparation, and found out there was a cache nearby!  I enjoyed finding it.  The cache was outside the admissions office.

 

Fast forward to this past weekend, and now I'm attending my daughter's college graduation.  After the ceremony, she needed to go change clothes and freshen up so that we could have pictures taken at scenic spots around campus.  This left me with 90 minutes to kill.  So, I fired up my smartphone, with no advance preparation, and found out there was a cache nearby!  I enjoyed finding it.  The cache was outside the alumni office.

[anpefi]

One of the most beautiful coincidences I have had was while searching for the northernmost cache in Spain, about 200 km from my city. When I'm signing the logbook, I look at the previous signature, which was on the same day, and when I read it I noticed that the signers were good friends of ours (even before the geocaching) that we did not know they were in the area. I called them and they were eating in the nearby town, 2 km away, so we went to join them and enjoy some time together, since we had not seen each other for a while.

 

The last coincidence happened this weekend. I was with my wife and my 4 year old son walking a path that went down to a waterfall. Halfway down the wooden handrail had burned in a recent fire and made it dangerous to continue going down, so we sat down in a stone for a snack. At first we did not plan to do geocaching, and I had not seen the caches in the area, but at that break it occurred to me to see if there was a cache nearby. My surprise was to open the app that marked me 0 meters! We were sitting on it, because under the stone there was a hole with the hiding place. The bad part is that the cache was missing, but it was the coincidence of opening the app and being right over the hiding place. That's precision the first time!

[+GeoElmo6000]

One time I was visiting Seattle for a week, which is across the country from where I live.  I had a day to myself and so I drove the three hours to the Original Stash Tribute Plaque.  When I arrived and signed the log at the cache, I saw that the finder before me, earlier the same day, was a guy I know from a few miles away from where I live who attends many of my events.

[+J Grouchy]

I actually did have another odd and unexpected coincidence.  I was putting together a multi a couple years ago and while out scouting a secluded backroad for places to put one of the stages (which was a magnetic tag with coordinates to the final), I spotted an overgrown guardrail.  When I walked up to see the condition, I looked down and saw what appeared to be a peanut butter jar wrapped in silver duct tape (part of the red cap was exposed).  I knew immediately it HAD to be a geocache.  I opened it and, sure enough, I saw a log sheet with a bunch of names and dates written on it.  There were no published/active caches on the map, so I did some research and saw that it was a cache that had been archived several years earlier.  

https://coord.info/GLJRMGP0

 

That wasn't even the only time this happened.  I FTFed a new cache close to my office...only after finding an old key hide that turned out to be an old archived cache at the exact same location.  https://coord.info/GLMP0CFY

 

[+NYPaddleCacher]

2 hours ago, GeoElmo6000 said:

One time I was visiting Seattle for a week, which is across the country from where I live.  I had a day to myself and so I drove the three hours to the Original Stash Tribute Plaque.  When I arrived and signed the log at the cache, I saw that the finder before me, earlier the same day, was a guy I know from a few miles away from where I live who attends many of my events.

I had a similar experience, thought it wasn't quite as far away.   I was driving from home to the Outer Banks in North Carolina (about an 11 hour drive) and stopped at a rest stop in Maryland (about 7 hours from home) to grab a find for the first time in the state.   The two previous logs were from a couple of local cachers I had met a few times previous at local events.  Then I noticed the name of the CO on the log sheet.  It was someone I had met while doing a night cache close to my house the previous weekend.  I found several other caches over the next week that had the same two signature from the local cachers.  They had taken a vacation in the same area that I did the previous week. 

 

In the first year I was geocaching I was heading out for the day to find a few caches in a heavily wooded area only accessible by seasonal roads.  My neighbor was out in the driveway (which we share) working on a bicycle that he had just bought at a garage sale.   It was an old Schwinn, complete with a basket on the handle bars and cleaned up nicely.   He said the only thing that it needed was a bike bell.   One of the caches I went for was a 3/4 mile steep hike to an overlook.   After finding the cache, and opening up the container I saw that one of the swag items was a bike bell.  Fortunately, I had a few things to trade for it.   I gave it to my neighbor, which meant I got to explain geocaching to him.

 

[+Joe_L]

This is a darker story.  In 1993, a local school bus driver was struck and killed by a car while tending to his broken-down school bus along a major road on my commuting route.  (I had passed the bus 10 to 15 minutes before the accident.)  In 2014, a cacher who was unaware of the story placed one of a series of caches named after Rolling Stones songs a few hundred feet from the location of the accident.  That cache: 19th Nervous Breakdown.  I found the coincidence a little disturbing.

[+schmittfamily]

One time back in the early 2000s I was playing softball when we had a thunderstorm blow in.   The rain just opened up for 10 minutes and swamped the field.  Even though the sun came out they called the games.   As I was packing my stuff up, a bolt of lightning comes out of the sun and hits the scoreboard.  Easily the closest I have been to lightning strike - at least while outside. 

 

Fast forward 10 years and someone has a puzzle cache named "When Lightning Strikes" at pretty much the exact coordinates I was standing at when that happened.   

 

 

[+The Snowdog]

When I was very young we lived about halfway up Mt. Lemmon near Tucson, AZ. We moved away when I was five and I hadn't been back in over fifty years. Well last year I made a geo-trip back to Arizona and was going to make a point of going up the mountain to see where we once lived (a row of seven little government houses that are long gone, that area is part of the park now). Before I left Dad reminded me of a story of how he had helped to fight a forest fire and found a big clump of ladybugs that had swarmed to escape the fire. He filled a burlap bag with them and brought them home and turned them loose on the mountain. Cute story, eh? So while on that trip I stopped at a cache in New Mexico and it had an unactivated ladybug trackable! So there was an opportunity to tell the story of the Ladybugs of Mt. Lemon that I had just heard from my father.

 

https://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=2634411

Edited May 24, 2018 by The Snowdog

[+katsurian]

A couple friends and I did a bushwacking cache on the Washington side of the Gorge. A couple years later I passed through Yuba City, Ca. and stopped for the Sept 2000 cache. At the bottom of the page was both their names dated one day apart so I got to put my name right below theirs.

[+PlantAKiss]

Interesting stories y’all. :-)

 

I had had been out of town and was just getting back. I needed to call a friend about dinner plans and since I don’t talk on the phone or text while driving, I pulled into a parking lot to make my call. Made my call and then thought “Well, let me just check and see if there are any nearby caches.” The closest one came up... about 6 feet away! It was an LPC and turns out of allllll the empty parking spaces in the lot, I’d parked right in front of a cache. All I had to do was step out of my car. From reading the listing to find was about 1 min.   

 

I have another one buuuut.....it’s kind of embarrassing. I’ll have to think on whether to tell that one or not.... 

[+boisestate]

August 2015 Final Geocaching Block Party week.

We were late in requesting our HQ tour tickets and the tour "sold out" during the entire week we would be in Seattle for the block party.

We were bummed but we accepted the fate.

 

Mid week while going for GC49HR7 (HQGT: Beneath Aurora) we ran into another goecacher at GZ.  After a brief greeting and conversation, we were offered four tickets (the exact amount we needed) to the HQ tour.  He explained that his group had extra tickets that they wouldn't be able to use. The coincidence was pretty awesome and we got to enjoy the HQ tour.

 

Edited May 26, 2018 by boisestate
typo

[+TheLimeCat]

I was trying to solve a difficult puzzle by a notorious local cacher just the other day. I came up with some coordinates that I guessed at more than anything. I flubbed a couple of the questions and there was no checker. All the same, I went to my coordinates which I'm still not sure are correct because I never managed to find the cache. What I did find at those coordinates was a pair of bison tubes belonging to another notorious Seattle area puzzler. The bison tubes were the second waypoint of a mystery cache of his that has been archived for more than 12 years. He told me I could keep them, but unfortunately, I had already left the scene. 

 

A common coincidence has been running into fellow cachers, CO and otherwise, at cache sites where I'm not hunting an FTF, but that's probably something a lot of people can relate to.

 

Another neat story, though not necessarily coincidence, is my experience with the Peace Sign series in Seattle. I went about solving and finding the 42 puzzle caches in the series 1 or 2 months before the entire series was set to be archived. This was a series where half of the caches were marked with a code, but each was of a different size and most were micros. If you're ever planning on hiding a series of caches with codes, my advice to you is to put a code in EVERY cache. As it was, there was some amount of uncertainty at every cache over whether or not there was a code involved, so after finding all 42 caches in the series, I had only collected 18/21 codes and didn't have the resources to revisit the 24 possible caches in the remaining time, so I left the final unfound and the series was archived on October 1st, 2016. What I noticed, however, was that the final remained active for several months afterwards. I contacted the owner who was in poor health and did not have the resources to remove the container (a hefty hollowed-out stump). He was gracious enough to give me the remaining code words and asked that I remove the container for him so that he could archive the listing. I found the final as my 500th cache (which also happened to be the 400th find on the series) and the stump has been sitting on my porch ever since. 

 

On Tuesday, I was the FTF on a difficult mystery placed by a wonderful local CO who is perhaps my favorite CO in the game. The cache had been placed on 5/21/18 and was my 6th FTF ever. Just one year prior, that same CO had placed another difficult mystery very nearby. I was the FTF on that cache on 5/21/17.

 

I was in Oregon earlier this month visiting family for a day. The day after we had some time to cache around before heading home. That same day, a new virtual published less than a mile from us. We darted over immediately and parked at the trailhead. On our way to the cache, we were walking behind 2 people, one of whom was carrying her phone in her hand. That's something I've often found myself doing while caching, so I started speculating that they were fellow cachers but chalked it up to my own overanalysis. Once we arrived on site, I began reading the listing to others in my group. The man turned to me and asked: "are you here for the virtual?" They were locals who were attempting the FTF as well, and I had been walking just behind them on the trail the entire time. We wound up getting a 3-way Co-Ftf. 

Edited May 27, 2018 by TheLimeCat

[+JohnCNA]

Very early in my caching career I hid a cache along a popular bike trail. One of the early logs said he had hid a cache on the same day, 20 feet from my cache. Mine got published first, so his was denied. He picked his up and logged mine.

 

I opened his profile page so I could email him a 'sorry about that' email. Seeing his picture on on the profile page, it was a friend from 25 years ago that I had lost track of. We met up at a local event and caught up again. It was great to reconnect. I doubt we would have crossed paths again if it were not for geocaching. 

[+Viajero Perdido]

I was doing a cache series, up and over a mountain.

 

On the way to the first one, I wondered, why is it called "#2"?  I shrugged it off; no cell signal so I couldn't check.

 

I sat down for a break and noticed, cool view!

 

Through the camera viewfinder, I realized I was looking at a hide.  It was #1.

 

 

Due to a PQ glitch (my own fault) I didn't have coords for this one.  There's no trail, just a vague route up the mountain.  What are the odds I'd choose to sit down right in front of it?

 

Edited May 30, 2018 by Viajero Perdido

[+CAVinoGal]

I picked up a trackable from a cache this morning, Mini Me, whose goal is to be pictured with other Mini-Coopers.  It's a Matchbox model of a mini-cooper.  As we drove away from the cache, a mini-cooper was following us!  He turned off before I could snap a pic, and I hadn't even logged the retrieval yet!

[+GrateBear]

None for me that I can recall, but there is one cacher in my area who has an amazing number of FTFs where the log says "I was just driving by the site when I got a message that there was a new cache there".  Isn't that something?  

[+Zane and Bianca]

On 26/05/2018 at 11:27 AM, PlantAKiss said:

Interesting stories y’all. :-)

 

I had had been out of town and was just getting back. I needed to call a friend about dinner plans and since I don’t talk on the phone or text while driving, I pulled into a parking lot to make my call. Made my call and then thought “Well, let me just check and see if there are any nearby caches.” The closest one came up... about 6 feet away! It was an LPC and turns out of allllll the empty parking spaces in the lot, I’d parked right in front of a cache. All I had to do was step out of my car. From reading the listing to find was about 1 min.   

 

I have another one buuuut.....it’s kind of embarrassing. I’ll have to think on whether to tell that one or not.... 

NOW we have to know ??

[+Aer72]

Got another one myself. So I found a cache (

Luttrell's Tower by The Happy Panda (Team Tate) And looked at co ( the happy panda) and saw an eyecatching profile pic. Afew months later found another cache GC4MYAZ  and looked at logs to help find and saw it had been found recently by the happy panda!?!?!?!?

[+SgtSue]

i was in Oregon for a few days working, limited time to cache but I did find a couple. Fast forward abt 5 years I was looking at some genealogy stuff and found a lead on my Great-grandfather who had left the family at some point. No one knew for sure where he went but it was assumed he had gone somehow back out west again. Turns out the old fellow is buried about a mile as the crow flies from one of the caches I found. Have the old fellows section and plot number even. 

[+briansnat]

When I found my first cache back in  2001 I didn't know whether to sign my geocaching name or my real name so I signed both.   A few weeks later I receive an e-mail from the CO asking me if I knew Al and Mark.  "Sure, Al is my dad and Mark is my brother", I responded.  Turns out that the CO on my first ever find was a retired cop who worked with my dad and brother, who are also retired cops and he was good friends with both of them. 

[+frinklabs]

 

[+Viajero Perdido]

Another local cacher and I drive identical cars, even the same color.

 

Last weekend I hosted a camping event in the middle of nowhere, at an abandoned ranch at the end of a lonely road, deep in the uninhabited oil patch.  There are two main ways to approach, meeting at a junction not far from the coords.  I was getting there a day early, and I knew [cacher] was too.  No idea when.

 

As I approached the junction I thought, wouldn't it be funny if [cacher] drove up at the same moment?

 

That's exactly what happened.  Two identical cars meet at a lonely intersection.  We exchanged waves.  I had the stop sign, but he let me go ahead, dooming himself to eating my dust for the last ten minutes.  I guess that's event-owner privilege: right of way. 

[+DerDiedler]

Once I´ve picked up a TB with the mission to get to a certain cache in the verry north of Norway. Roughly 3000 Kilometers away from where i picked it up. The next week I strarted long scheduled Nordkap trip, passing by that exact cache.

 

An other time I droped a TB in Hanoi/ Vietnam and shortly later a cacher from close to whre i live brought it right back.

[+RecipeForDisaster]

We were heading to a group kayak trip an hour from home and stopped to grab a field puzzle about 20 minutes into the drive. Literally AT the first stage, there was a car with a kayak on it, both of which we recognized as belonging to another paddle club member who would also attend the paddle, although we had no idea where he lived. There's an apartment house right there. We did join him on the river an hour later. What are the chances that we'd pick that cache and his distinctive car and boat would be in plain sight at the time? If the boat wasn't loaded we would not have noticed.

[+PlantAKiss]

On 6/3/2018 at 10:09 AM, Zane and Bianca said:

NOW we have to know ??

Haaaa! Ummm...errr....uuuuh...let me think about that. Maybe I have no shame. But maybe I do. Lol. (There’s a hint in that paragraph somewhere.) ?