This is the story of how I became an addict. On August 4th, 2010, I was hiking the Castle Rock and taking pictures of Plateau Lizards. I was laying on my stomach to get a cool shot when something caught my eye...
Lizard that assisted my accidental find
I won't explain what I saw to prevent any spoilers, but I accidentally stumbled across a geocache, the Castle Rock cache hidden by RocketMan. There was also a Dog Tag with a website and instructions on it. I didn't know what either of these things were at the time, but they intrigued me. I just had to find out what all this was!
I called my friend, Flic, to see if he knew what these things were and he did! He told me to sign and date the piece of paper, take the Dog Tag and re-hide the cache. He then texted me coordinates to the two closest caches for me to try and find. I found the one that used to be here (it also had a Travel Bug), but had no luck with the other cache.
I came back the next day with a friend, who saw my Facebook posts about my accidental adventure and wanted to learn more.
Her first Geocache: East of Eden
I fixed my previously mentioned error...
This was supposed to be placed back under the rock where I found it, oops
...and then we tried to find a few more caches in the area. I didn't know about the phone app yet and we were caching with my car GPS. Let me tell you, that is a difficult task! It only got us to the closest spot on the street next to the cache (several football fields away on some). I am sure we annoyed Flic with our phone calls so he could verbally walk us to the caches. After this experience, I found a Geocaching app that made caching a thousand times easier.
Flic told me where to go online to sign up and create a username so I could log the ones we found online. This was all foreign to me at the time, but I am SO glad that I did. The caches were fun, but the aspect of Travel Bugs is what sealed the deal for my addiction. I am a trackable addict!
I decided from those first two days that I was going to find at least one cache every day for one year. It was difficult and I even had a day surgery after I broke my toe, but I was able to accomplish my goal! It was pretty fun convincing my Mom to take me to a cache instead of straight home from surgery. Of course, it was a Sandhillers' hide but we got lucky with a quick find! I ended my year long streak on August 4th, 2011 at Geocaching Headquarters for a 366 day streak and my 1,600th cache!
My parents and me at HQ
I don't see this addiction ever stopping, nor do I want it to. It is fun to continually make and accomplish personal caching goals. As I said before, I am a trackable addict! In 2013, I created a project called 'Operation Jeep Rescue' and I recovered, made proxies for, and released over 110 Jeeps into the wild!
I kept one set that were "virgin" Jeeps (I was the first one to log them) and as a prize to you for reading my story, and for finding this cache, you can discover my set of Jeeps inside this cache. Please do not remove these proxies so that everyone can enjoy a Jeep set discovery, thanks!
If you feel so inclined, please share your personal story of how you started your geocaching addiction in your log. I would love to hear about it! Thanks!
FIRST TO FIND HONORS GOES TO Flic!