“So much for leave no trace! Dude, you gotta come see this!” Lenny called over as he stared at a large boulder.
“Oh boy, now what?” Carl replied as he attempted to stagger over to where his friend was situated. He reached the northfacing, large rock and examined what Lenny had called him over for in the first place. In large, squiggly letters someone had managed to carve ‘I Love Lisa’. “Well apparently someone loves Lisa!”
“Yeah, I can see that,” Lenny said as he placed his GPS receiver on the rock. “Lisa must have been some enchanted evening in order to get a love note for her etched into a rock. Jeez! Talk about messing with nature!”
“Oh definitely, but I’d rather not admire the rocks around us. It’s about a hundred degrees out here, so can we just find the geocache and leave?” Carl said as looked down at his GPS receiver. He found himself starting at a blank screen. 'Freaking drop detection' he grumbled to himself as he pressed the button on the top of the device. The ever-so-familiar beeping noise emanated from it, and the front screen suddenly flashed the company’s name and production year. It was now on, and ready to collect the satellites again.
“Well that’s interesting,” Lenny called out from the other side of the pile. He pulled a small, reddish colored rock out of the top of the pile and held it up in the sun. “Doesn’t this thing kind of look like a rosebud?”
“Yeah, a little bit.” Carl replied a tad annoyed. He looked back down at his handheld device and noticed that the satellites had been collected. The arrow on the screen was now pointing northwest, instructing him to go fourteen feet in that direction.
“I gotta say dude, even though I’m out in the woods doing what I love right now I have to be a little jealous of my brother,” Lenny said poking a stick into the crevice of a small rock cluster. He’s gotta be, what, thirty minutes over Tokyo right now? The great country of Japan awaits him!”
“Yeah I’m a little jealous too. Now if he were actually a geocacher and would be caching in the country then I’d be even more jealous!” Carl said, chuckling a bit and standing where his handheld device claimed his destination was. “Then again, you have to remember, isn’t your wife not too big on the whole geocaching thing?”
“You’re right I guess. She doesn’t really seem to see the point of it. If I did go to Japan with her I probably wouldn’t have much time to find caches while there!” Lenny said, poking his stick into another hole, hitting a soft patch of leaves. “If there was a book about the secrets of a successful marriage, going geocaching only with your wife’s approval should be on the list!”
Carl bent over and reached his hand under another flat rock. Inside he felt the ever-too-familiar feeling of a plastic container. “Found it” he replied as he removed a regular sized lock-and-lock box from under the rock.
“Nice catch,” Lenny said as he made his way over to him. “The hint said it was under the western side of a big rock. Seems accurate.”
Carl sat down on a slightly smaller rock and unlocked the four flaps of the box. Inside were the usual geocache items – the logbook, a pencil and a few small trinkets. He opened the logbook to the first page. ‘Stuck in the Middle by Droppy477’ was scrawled on the inside of the log book.
Lenny glanced over Carl’s shoulder at the book. “Wow, haven’t heard that name in a while! Didn’t he change his username to JWrappeler or something like that?” he asked as Carl flipped the book over to the next page.
“Yeah, something like that. This a pretty clever name for the cache too – in between two mountains in this little valley. Kind of like being stuck in a house between two bad neighbors!”
“I wonder how long that declaration of love for Lisa has been there for,” Lenny said as his attention shifted back the engraved rock. “If it was teenage love then I’m sure there was a moaning Lisa after the break-up, but I guess that mystery of their love life will never be solved!"
“It appears TheSolobear and Skyla were the first ones to find this” Carl said as he began to flip through the log book. “They said it was four degrees out when they found it. Now that’s dedication…going for a geocache when it’s that cold!”
Lenny focused his attention back to the log book. “Going caching when it’s that cold out seems a little risky, don’t you think? I mean, ice could make for some dangerous curves when out driving!”
“True, but some people are addicted!” Carl said looking at more names in the book. He pointed at a scribble on the next page. “Just take Zowtti, for example. Him, Divinggg and jackets93554 have been known to go out caching at four, sometimes three in the morning!”
“Does it say when he found it?” Lenny asked.
“Pfft…Zowtti never puts dates when he signs the log! Getting his name on the page is enough for him!” Carl replied, looking at more pages in the book. “This cache was popular in October of last year! LLCougar, Veins, PlanforChaos, extraordinarydave, meanape393, and Rover. all found it on the same day! Then time&steve, ~TheNoble~, and journey1102, stuG, kannon402, whalefacesr, and bluefalcon9396 found it within the same week but on different days!”
“Must have been before extraordinarydave moved. He’s in Wyoming now, isn’t he?” Lenny said, now looking off towards the mountains.
“Yup, to the wilds of Wyoming. Hope he’s doing alright out there now.” Carl put the log book to the side and began going through some of the trinkets inside the container. “A Homer Simpson PEZ Dispenser. Now that’s pretty cool!”
He put the dispenser to the side, reached into his pocket, pulled out a football card and placed it in the container. “Look, there’s a calling card in here from Wayfarer69. Seems like he leaves one of these at nearly ever geocache he finds. Was he the one people called the boy who knew too much or am I thinking of someone else?”
Lenny picked up a rock and through it into the forest across from him. “Definitely not him. I don’t know who you’re thinking of, but it’s not Wayfarer.”
“Fair enough,” Carl said, looking through more of the trinkets inside. “Looks like someone else left a radioactive man action figure from some kind of superhero movie too. Interesting, but I like the dispenser more.”
He picked the logbook back up and flipped to a page where he found a blank space. Above the space was a signature from DAWG&CATZ and rvnthe4th. ‘Weird to see these two find this cache. I thought they only went after puzzles’ he thought to himself as he pressed his pen to the paper and began writing.
‘Flyer of 5Seagulls and UpDownRightLenny TFTC Live Life on the Fast Lane’ he wrote in the book before shutting it, officially signing both himself and Lenny in. The last part of his signature was a little slogan he had been using for much of his life, and was going to be the title of a TV show he aspired to create and have last for twenty some-odd seasons.
He placed the log book back in the container, locked all four lids and replaced it under a rock.
“All set?” he asked Lenny, who had just thrown another rock.
“Absolutely. Good thing I didn’t have to solve a puzzle to find this one either. I hate puzzle caches, especially when they involve really long stories that you have to read and figure out information from. Those are the worst!”