79 Feet of Waterline, Nicely Making Way Traditional Geocache

Now that I live in Manchester NH I've been finding it increasingly difficult to maintain this cache, primarily because of the nature of the final (which you'll understand if you've found 80 Feet, and you'll understand once you find this one).

I've included the cache page below just for completeness. You do not need to solve the puzzle. Just go to the listed coordinates. Actually, I've updated the coords with my 60Csx so the listed coords are slightly different from the puzzle solution.

If you want to know where Plaques B and C are and what objects are there? Just look at the waypoints section below. It is all there.

After you find the cache, go inside the nearby doors, up the stairs and turn left. A short distance down the hall you'll find a model ship museum. And yes, there are "No Tresspassing" signs on the door. You do not need to go inside to find the cache. MIT is a pretty open campus, it was only recently when doors sprouted locks. If you want, go to the Campus Patrol headquarters just north on Mass Ave and ask for permission to visit the museum. Once they stop laughing they'll say yes.

It was fun, thanks for finding my cache.

This cache will take you on a small tour of the MIT campus. It will certainly exercise your mind, not your physical ability. There are no rope bridges to cross, nor even piles of rocks or brush to move to get to the cache. Indeed, the cache itself is not even hidden. The entire tour was designed so that it could be solved by a person in a wheelchair, although such a person may need an assistant to retrieve the cache and there may be a fair bit of (level) ground to travel. (It takes significantly less than 1.5 miles to travel from the original location to Points B and C and then to the final cache.) This cache may not be solvable during the winter; snow cover might stop you. It all depends on how well MIT plows and shovels. This is a small cache. The container is about a liter in volume, with a small opening. Consequently please do not leave any items in the cache (with the exception of Geocoins I guess) and please don’t expect to find anything in the cache. You must sign the logbook, make a log entry, and email a description of the cache to log this one.

Parking

You may find parking near 42 21.531N 071 05.858W. If not, just drive around a lot, there is parking in Cambridge, you just have to find it. Much of the parking in Cambridge is by resident permit only, read the signs.

The Starting Point and the Puzzle

The cache starts you off in a central part of the MIT campus. At the cache location you will see an object. North of the object is a metal plaque in the ground. (This may be snow-covered; it is at a heading of 330 degrees, right at the intersection of the paving stones with the cement circle.) This is Plaque A. You will want to copy this down exactly, photograph it, or skip down and copy just the letters you will need off of it (see instructions below).

Now comes the mental part. There are two other places on campus that you must visit and I’m not going to tell you where they are nor what you will find there. You are going to have to do some research to find these places. How you do this research is up to you. I can think of several ways to do it (but then again, it is easy for me since I made up the cache!). I certainly do not think this is impossible. You may find it necessary to visit the campus multiple times to solve this cache, but a well-equipped geocacher will not need to.

As a hint, the first of these locations (Point B) is located within a circular region with an area of less than 0.05 square miles centered on the listed location. The second location (Point C) is located within a circular region with an area of less that 0.25 square miles also centered on this location. Math? You want me to do math? Well, you are on the MIT campus right now... Sadly, Plaque C may be covered with significant snowfall. I checked this area after the area's first big snowfall and it was plowed. Then I checked after the second one and it was not.

At Point B there is a printed sign (Plaque B) inside a building. You do not need to enter the building to read the sign. As with Plaque A, you should copy it down exactly, photograph it, or read the instructions and just copy the few letters you need. You do not need to get up close to the building and peer in windows etc. to see if it is the right spot. The Point B location is obvious from 20 to 30 feet away if you are looking in the right direction. There are student dorms near Point A, conduct yourself accordingly. Of course, once you have found Point B you will need to approach it closely to read the sign.

At Point C there is a metal plaque embedded in the concrete. The area here may appear to be wheelchair hostile, but it is not. Please copy the plaque exactly, or photograph it, etc...

You will use the lettering on the three plaques to determine the location of the cache and logbook.

Decoding

I'll use the traditional letter/number code, A=1, B=2, C=3 etc., but I will expand on this some. I will also give you the line number and the plaque letter.

An example will probably help here. Let's pretend that there are two additional plaques, Plaque D has 1 line on it, and it says "IHTFP" and Plaque E has 2 lines on it, the first line is "Oliver" and the second line is "Smoot." If I designate a letter by the code "4.1.D" I mean the 4th letter of line 1 of plaque D, and if I say "3.2.E" I mean the 3rd letter of line 2 of plaque E. So the code:

4.1.D
3.2.E
4.2.E

4.1.D
5.1.E
3.1.E

4.1.D times (5.1.E plus 3.1.E)

The final cache is located at 42 21.X 071 05.Y where X is given by the equation:

(1.4.A times 8.5.B times 13.4.C) plus
(1.4.A times 26.3.B times 4.7.C)

square root of Z

11.2.C
15.3.B
10.4.C
7.6.B
2.1.A
3.1.A

As a sanity check, keep on adding up the digits of x until you get a single number. For example, if X was 872, you would add 8 plus 7 plus 2 and get 17, so then add 1 plus 7 and get 8. The digits of X added up are 9. The digits of Y added up are 1.

Okay, on to the cache location!

You do not need to go poking about in the brush to find the physical cache. You should be able to see it quite easily, but of course (heh heh heh) you need to be looking in the exact right place! Please sign the logbook and return it exactly as found. There are directions to an interesting short side trip in the front pages of the logbook.

I'm hungry!

I assume you'll have worked up an appetite doing this cache, so you'll want to head over to Mary Chung's at 41 21.822N 071 6.054W which is a local MIT hangout which serves wonderful Chinese food. You should try the Suan la Chow Show, Dun Dun Noodles with (or without) Shredded Chicken, the spicy Green Beans, Spicy Tofu with Dun Dun sauce and of course the Hot Pickled Cabbage appetizer. You can also visit the MIT Museum at 42 21.729 071 05.849 after you waddle back from Mary's. Mary only takes cash and is closed on Tuesdays. Her restaurant is about 0.4 miles from where I suggested you park the car. If you are in a hurry, you can grab a bite to eat at the myriad student grilles and cafeterias at 41 21.527 071 05.677.

There, now, that wasn't too bad, was it? You only had to answer two hard research questions, decipher a finicky code, add, multiply and take a square root and to top it all off, I asked you to park in Cambridge! I hope you enjoyed it. I know I enjoyed setting it up. While you are on campus, perhaps you might like my other MIT cache, Cube Root of 39.304. Please do not upload a photograph of the objects and plaques at Point A, B or C nor a photo of the cache itself. Thank you! (And thanks Amy for help with the cache itself!)

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