This medium-length multicache adventure will take you to fourteen signs at the two back-to-back rest areas here on I-44 and may take up to two hours to complete. Before it's over... you will have done a bit of math... and might have had to contend with dodging thorns, ivy and plants that leave pieces of themselves on your clothes... flicking off ticks... or possibly even wading through water... all depending on what time of year you attempt this find. The difficulty and terrain are set accordingly. Consider yourself forewarned! 
Consider this hunt a caching version of BINGO. At each of the fourteen waypoints are either one or two signs (noted in the waypoint description). For each sign (or pair of signs)... you will count how many of each letter of BINGO are on the sign(s). That is... find out how many total B's there are... then how many I's... then how many N's... and G's and O's. Yes... you will need all these numbers for all the signs.
To make things a little easier... I'm giving you two things. First of all... I'm giving you a BINGO card (PDF | PNG | JPEG | GIF) that you can fill out with the total of each letter at each sign. And second... I'm providing a checksum for each of the waypoints. If you add the total B's plus I's plus N's plus G's plus O's... then you should get the following sums at each waypoint...
Sign 1: 8
Sign 2: 119
Sign 3: 5
Sign 4: 7
Sign 5: 87
Sign 6: 14
Sign 7: 3
|
Sign 8: 5
Sign 9: 2
Sign 10: 0
Sign 11: 38
Sign 12: 7
Sign 13: 4
Sign 14: 13
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As an additional sanity check... the BINGO card also includes checksums for all the B's added together, the I's, the N's, the G's and the O's.
NOTE: Do NOT include the small print at the bottom of the signs that indicates the sign manufacturer or serial number or anything like that in your letter counts. If you can't read the text from 10 feet away... it's probably not part of the game.
NOTE: The waypoints for the signs are not listed in the most advantageous order of attack. Sign 1 is just the best (probably only) place to walk between the two rest areas. So your first task is to make sure that you approach them starting with a sign closest to one end of the the two rest areas (east or west)... and heading the other direction. You'll probably appreciate it more if you plan out your order ahead of time and don't have to backtrack so much.
Now for the fun part. Once you have counted all of the relevant characters at each of the signs... you can do the following basic mathematical calculations to find the cache. I have intentionally included every number you gathered in the calculations so that you won't have wasted your time. Each of the calculations is based on only the letter counts from that waypoint. And each waypoint coincides with a digit of the final coordinates... in order from Sign 1 through Sign 14... except for the leading zero of the West degrees.... which is assumed. In other words... take the results of the calculations below and fill them into the coordinates like this:
N (S1)(S2)° (S3)(S4).(S5)(S6)(S7) W 0(S8)(S9)° (S10)(S11).(S12)(S13)(S14)
| Sign 1: |
(B + I + N + G) / O |
| Sign 2: |
B + (I * (N - O - G)) |
| Sign 3: |
(B + I + N + G +O) / 5 |
| Sign 4: |
(B + I) + (N * O) - G |
| Sign 5: |
((O - N) + (I / B) + G) / 2 |
| Sign 6: |
((N + O) / G) + (B * I) |
| Sign 7: |
(B + I + N + G + O) * 2 |
| Sign 8: |
((B + I + N + G) * O) + 3 |
| Sign 9: |
(B + I + N + G + O) / O |
| Sign 10: |
(B * I) + ((N - G) * O) |
| Sign 11 (currently missing so answer given): |
(I + N - G) / (O - B) = 3 |
| Sign 12: |
I + (B * N * G * O) |
| Sign 13: |
(B + I + G) + (N * N) + O |
| Sign 14: |
(I + N) + (B * G * O) |
The checksum for all the numerical digits of the final coordinates is 67. You can check your final coordinates at GeoChecker.com.
There are a few small pieces of swag, a log and a pencil in the cacle. There is also a new, unregistered, glow-in-the-dark, miniature DNF geocoin in the cache for the first person to make the find.
Have fun playing the game!
Congratulations to roverschmidt and DirtyBeard for First To Find!
This cache owner is a proud member of
SLAGA:
