Genius Loci: [b]
RIP Cinderella's Wheels...[/b]
"Cinderella's Wheels" (my second hide) was quite radical in its day, incorporating a very unique container at a time when anything other than an ammo box or Tupperware stash was virtually unheard of. Cache hunters are much more sophisticated now, but in those early days, everyone was delightfully befuddled by something so out of the ordinary!
In fact, it was the container itself that inspired the theme for this cache. I'd picked up a decorative, fake pumpkin during the Halloween season, and installed a custom made, waterproof chamber inside it. Although the fake was entirely convincing (virtually indistinguishable from the genuine article until turned over) the real problem was how to leave such an obvious object oudoors where it wouldn't be Muggled.
Of course, one possibility was to hide it in plain sight in a pumpkin patch. Luckily, I'd noticed one nearby, although closer examination proved that site to be just a dump where the neighboring sports complex had discarded their halloween decorations. Never-the-less, the cache now had a logical hiding place, and it fit in perfectly with the old cornstalks and real pumpkins.
I initially toyed with a Peanuts/Charlie Brown "Great Pumpkin" theme for the cache, but the Cinderella fairy tale seemed to fit much better with the scruffy, neglected neighborhood. Plus, asking the cache hunter to help "rescue" Cinderella made for a more appealing description. To top it off, the cache name was a cute reference to the container itself (Cinderella's pumpkin coach).
Like many novice cachers, I assumed that a multicache would be more fun and attractive to potential hunters than a regular cache (experience had yet to teach me that multis are actually more likely to be[i] avoided[/i] by hunters). Therefore, I worked hard to install three unique preliminary stages in addition to the fake pumpkin final.
When everything was ready, I asked an experienced hunter to attempt a "test run" to be sure that the cache was findable by a typical geocacher. That was also a radical idea; geocache hiders tend to be very secretive, and the notion of sharing a cache with anyone before the "First Finder" was unheard of. However, the test proved invaluable, as the "Guinea pig" (thank you, AngelaM) uncovered some problems which I resolved before publishing the cache online in November, 2002.
[i]continued in following log:[/i]