Twenty-four years ago I saw my infant son for the first and only time. His mother took him and left the town where we lived. My attempts to contact her were rebuffed. Over the years I became convinced that she had married and another man had adopted my son. In February 2013 I was contacted by a young man looking for his biological father. It was my son Stephen. We have visited often by phone and we spent four days together at the end of February. He is a true blessing in my life.
I created this cache to represent the tortuous route it took for Stephen and me to find each other. The cache is a puzzle cache with a quick multi thrown in.
This cache is located on private property. Since the property is mine you have permission to park nearby and access the cache. And, you never know when I may be looking over the fence.
When you arrive at the cache the first task is to open a cabinet locked with a combination lock. The combination is the last three digits of a four digit number that can be found on a nearby dead tree. Inside the cabinet is a smaller locked box and a cryptex.
In his 2003 novel the DaVinci Code, Dan Brown used a portable vault to hide secret messages. Brown called this device a cryptex which is a word he coined by combining cryptology and codex. The first cryptex in the book Brown described as a stone cylinder comprising six doughnut-sized disks of marble stacked and affixed to one another in a brass framework. End caps made it impossible to see inside the hollow cylinder. Each of the disks was carved with the entire alphabet and, since the disks can be rotated independently, the disks can be aligned to spell different words. The cryptex works much like a combination lock. When the disks are aligned to spell out the correct word the cylinders slide apart. In the inner cylinder secret information may be hidden.
The heart of this cache is a cryptex. It is created from pvc plumbing parts rather than marble. The design is a cylinder inside a cylinder rather than a cylinder inside a brass frame. I constructed the cryptex from plans on the internet. The cryptex I built has eight disks. Each disk has eight letters on it. Each disk is identical to the other seven disks.
The code word you are searching for is a commonly used eight-letter word. The word follows all the rules of Scrabble®; it is an English word, it is not a proper name and does not require capitalization, it is not an abbreviation, it is not a prefix or suffix standing alone, it does not use a hyphen or an apostrophe. The letters are (in alphabetical order):
A E I N R R S T
Yes there are two Rs. An additional part of the challenge is to determine which R to use in the two places where R appears in the code word. One of the Rs is placed next to a blank space on the disk. The other R resides between I and T on each disk. The word may use the same R in both positions or different Rs in each position. Once the correct word with the correct Rs is aligned left to right between the two arrows you can pull the two end caps away from each other and expose the inner cylinder. Inside one of the cylinders is the key which will open the inner box holding the log and the swag.
Once you unlock the inner box please sign the log. There is a pen in the box, but always bring your own pen just in case. There is no smiley for this cache if you don’t sign the log. The cache is stocked with swag and trackables. Please trade value for value and don’t grab all the trackables. There is an unrecorded trackable coin for the First-to-Find.
Once you have finished please lock the inside box, put the key back in the cryptex, scramble the letters, and finally lock the cabinet with the combination lock and scramble those numbers. Please do not put any hints in your logs. This cache is meant to be a challenge and the difficulty rating represents that. If you think the difficulty is too high or low please let me know.
There are no other hints for the cache. If you are unable to solve the cryptex send me an email and include the wording requesting a hint from the notice posted inside the cabinet.
Have fun!!!
The cache is located at the posted coordinates.
Congratulations to CrunchyFrog for the F-T-F