There is no reason to visit posted coordinates unless you would like to drop off a letter. Solve the puzzle below to unlock the final coordinates for the cache.
Inside the cache there is a homemade stamp - this is not a trade item. Please leave the stamp in the cache. Please also plan on bringing your own ink if you would like to use the stamp.
In preparation for World Postcard Day, I figured I would try my hand at some letter writing and send some postcards to three friends. I dug up some stamps, found some unused postcards, and chose which three friends to send these postcards to. I then asked these friends for their addresses. As they are all geocachers, and unsure of why I needed this information, they each responded with their address in a format any geocacher can understand – coordinates.
I figured this would be fine and the postal service would be able to figure out where these letters needed to go as there was a unique address (of sorts) on each postcard.
After writing short messages to my friends, I dropped the postcards in the mail and anxiously waited for my friends to let me know what they thought of my sudden attempt at playing scrivener. Instead, I received the three postcards in my mailbox with markings indicating each was undeliverable.
It turns out that USPS sorting machines are built to only read one kind of address, the boring kind with house numbers and street names. When they run into something that looks like a GPS waypoint, most facilities will simply return the mail to the sender.
At this particular sorting center though, there was a recent system update. Per a news release from the local postmaster, a database update meant to help the machines reroute undeliverable mail to the nearest postal annex had accidentally been pointed at the wrong dataset entirely. Instead of the internal USPS facility directory, it was reading from a national geocache database. So when the machine tried to calculate "distance to nearest facility" for my three unroutable postcards, it dutifully calculated the distance to the nearest unpublished geocache instead, which happened to be the letterbox I'd just hidden. This distance was then printed on each postcard, bars and all, before being returned to me.
Three postcards. Three coordinates. Three distances I never asked for. Somehow, everything I needed to find this geocache had been delivered right into my mailbox. How could I not use it for the puzzle?
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