It's a Small World

[+allardjd]

I live in a housing development with 3,500 homes.  I get notification e-mails from some of my previous finds and recently saw a few from a Geocacher whose ID included the name of the housing development.  Since these were local geocaches, I was pretty sure it was someone who lived here too.  

 

Talking to a neighbor earlier today and found out it's him - two doors away.  I thought that was pretty amazing in a community of 3,500 homes.  Looks like he and I will be making some treks together.

[+Max and 99]

20 minutes ago, allardjd said:

I live in a housing development with 3,500 homes.  I get notification e-mails from some of my previous finds and recently saw a few from a Geocacher whose ID included the name of the housing development.  Since these were local geocaches, I was pretty sure it was someone who lived here too.  

 

Talking to a neighbor earlier today and found out it's him - two doors away.  I thought that was pretty amazing in a community of 3,500 homes.  Looks like he and I will be making some treks together.

I've had some "small world" experiences like that too! Someone I had known for a couple of years in Scouts came up to me once and said "Are you Max and 99?"  "We're XX"!

So funny to find out it was them, since they were my daughter's favorite cache hiders and we never knew we actually knew them in real life!

 

My real-life Small World stories are even more surprising to me, but that's my Geocaching Small World story.

 

Thanks for sharing your Small World story.

[+cerberus1]

Cool.   

It was almost six months before we found my own sister was caching occasionally.   The other 2/3rds bumped into her at a cache.  

[+HunterandSamuel]

2 hours ago, allardjd said:

I live in a housing development with 3,500 homes.  I get notification e-mails from some of my previous finds and recently saw a few from a Geocacher whose ID included the name of the housing development.  Since these were local geocaches, I was pretty sure it was someone who lived here too.  

 

Talking to a neighbor earlier today and found out it's him - two doors away.  I thought that was pretty amazing in a community of 3,500 homes.  Looks like he and I will be making some treks together.

 

I love this! Thank you for sharing! 

[+Harry Dolphin]

39 minutes ago, cerberus1 said:

Cool.   

It was almost six months before we found my own sister was caching occasionally.   The other 2/3rds bumped into her at a cache.  

 

I started geocaching in 2004.  It wasn't until several years later that I found out that my brother in Colorado had been geocaching since 2002!  My brother in Washington, and my sister in Maine started in 2004.  But that was my fault...  My other three brothers and sisters do not geocache.

[+Goldenwattle]

15 minutes ago, Harry Dolphin said:

 

I started geocaching in 2004.  It wasn't until several years later that I found out that my brother in Colorado had been geocaching since 2002!  My brother in Washington, and my sister in Maine started in 2004.  But that was my fault...  My other three brothers and sisters do not geocache.

BIG family

[+niraD]

My "small world" moments have been times when I've been geocaching hundreds of miles from home, and I recognize the signatures of geocachers I know from around home.

[+Goldenwattle]

9 minutes ago, niraD said:

My "small world" moments have been times when I've been geocaching hundreds of miles from home, and I recognize the signatures of geocachers I know from around home.

I find that all the time in Australia, as Australians tend to travel. Thousands of kms from home in Australia or NZ, I come upon other geocacher's names from Canberra, where I live. I have even come upon their signatures in other countries. In fact I was contacted while visiting a city in the USA by another geocacher from Canberra who was visiting at the same time and had seen my signature. It's fun to see who has gone this way before me and to trace their routes.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

10 hours ago, niraD said:

My "small world" moments have been times when I've been geocaching hundreds of miles from home, and I recognize the signatures of geocachers I know from around home.

 

About 10 years ago I went out for a night cache on the day it was published and met a couple of cachers from Maryland that were visiting the area.  About a week later we left for a trip to the Outer Banks and stopped at a rest stop in Maryland where I found a cache that was owned the cachers I had met the week before.  When I signed the log I noticed the two previous signatures were from a couple of gecachers local to my area that I had met a couple of times.  When we got to the Outer Banks I did some caching, and on the log sheets for almost every cache I found were those same two signatures. It turned out that they were vacationing in the Outer Banks just a couple of days before we got there.  

[+TeamRabbitRun]

Not a GC thing, but this reminds me of a story.

 

A guy flips though a book on bird calls, then goes out into the yard and awkwardly tries a few. 

 

He softly calls "Hooooo!" and wholy smokes, he hears, very faintly, "hoooo!"

 

Of course, he's excited. Over the next four months, he's out there every night, HOO-ing back and forth with this elusive owl.

 

One day, his wife runs into their neighbor in a grocery store.

 

"Hi there! Been a while. How's Bob?"

 

"Oh, fine. How's Ted?"

 

"Oh, he's got a great little hobby going. He's learning all about birds. He's outside every night calling to this owl!"

 

"Really," her neighbor says. "What a coincidence..."

[+CAVinoGal]

16 hours ago, niraD said:

My "small world" moments have been times when I've been geocaching hundreds of miles from home, and I recognize the signatures of geocachers I know from around home.

 Yes, this happened to us while caching near my hometown in rural upstate NY.  We were visiting family from our current home in California, stopped for a cache at a rest stop on the Interstate about 20 miles from "home", and I see two signatures that were quite familiar!  They had attended GW in Ohio and were taking the long way back to CA through New England!!

 

Another small world moment happened to me in Arizona. I'd only been caching for a bout a year, and  I'd released a trackable near home in the San Francisco Bay Area.  We were headed to an event in Apache Junction with our son and daughter in law while visiting them, and on the way to the event I got a notification that someone had dropped a trackable in an event ... the very event we were headed to!  So I got to reconnect with my own TB, meet the cachers who had dropped it AND the ones that picked it up!

[+raynruth]

I’d been caching for a few years. My husband was on the drive cleaning my car. Our neighbour from 3 doors away commented on how filthy it was and my husband replied yea that’s the places she takes it geocaching. The neighbour was a geocacher of many years and I had found some of his caches locally.

[+Ambrosia]

There was a cacher who would post occasionally here in the forums. After a while, there was a new family who moved to our town, and started going to our church. I think it took a few months for us to figure out that the husband in the family was this cacher who posted in the forums sometimes. We had a good chuckle over that.

[+Viajero Perdido]

I live in western Canada, but late 2019 I was drifting through northern Thailand, and jumped at the chance to attend a geo-event in Chiang Mai, to meet some of the local cachers at their favorite pub.

 

I was a few beers in when a familiar face walked in.  I did a triple-take, what's in my beer?  No, the face was a match; it's an old caching friend from back home.  I had no idea she was even in the same continent.    Her kids were happy to start a non-cachers' table while we caught up.

 

Of all the geo-joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into this one.

[+fuzziebear3]

@allardjd -- here is small world.  I have cache hides here hundreds of miles away from you, and yet you are credited with the containers.  All through caching connections.