This is my first hide since returning from Australia. Coming from +30 to -20 and snow up to my waist was a definite deterrent from placing hides earlier. Now that Spring is sort of here, I felt it was time to get out and place another one.
One of my dog Madison’s favourite walks was along rough dirt roads that would form the basis for a new subdivision in our neighbourhood. That walk developed into the Madison Avenue cache. I couldn’t believe the amount of development that took place along that stretch of road while I was away. Madison Avenue is still there but not much else is.
We now go for walks south of our old route and Madison likes it much better – open fields and bush to run in. To me it looks like a great opportunity for new cache locations as well. This one is the first of several I plan on hiding in the area.
If you are planning to go for Madison Avenue as well as this one, a word of caution. While going as the crow flies is the shortest distance between the two, crows don't worry about crossing wide, deep drainage ditches. Your best bet might be to take the indirect route along the roads but if you are adventurous, there are logs across the ditch further south..
The first cache in the series came about walking Madison. I was out of the country for a year and when I came back and started walking Madison again, it struck me that there were some good locations for caches where we walked. After the first couple of caches I thought it would be neat to develop an area of caches that were close together and that people, if they so desired could come, park and find 11 caches in the matter of a couple of hours without driving all over the place (the furthest apart caches are only a little of a km apart). I put out a couple of park and grabs, a couple of regular sized caches, and the remainder are of the small/micro variety. There is only one nano and I purposely made it a difficult one. That was the only one I believed would be the only difficult find - some people disagreed but that's geocaching. As I was getting to the end of my planned hides, I thought it might be an interesting challenge to have people log how long it took them to find all the caches. Reviewing the geocaching rules and discussing it with geocaching.com, I realized that it couldn't be a "formal" challenge. So for interest and bragging rights, let me know how long it took you to find all 11 caches. The time would start when your first find was put back in its hide and would end when the final cache was signed and replaced. If you already have one find, no worries, the clock starts when you leave that GZ. With two finds, use them as the start and finish points but add 10 minutes to you time to allow for searching, logging and replacing the final cache after you reach its GZ. With three or more finds, go with a group but don't get involved in caches you've already found and just take the groups time. I don't know how many people will take this up but the challenge is there. Probably not available in winter but given some of the winters we've had lately, who knows.