I looked at it for a bit, but had no ideas off the bat. Of course 'Rat' seemed to work perfectly for the last word of both. :-)
Next I used some tools I had to generate better lists and pored over them with another cacher. I stared at them for many hours, but nothing worked. Then the cache difficulty was lowered and I felt even more stupid. Gotta figure this one out!
Finally, I found the answer to the second riddle and confirmed I was on the right track.
The first riddle, however was much harder. It took some hints from another cacher to narrow down the possibilities. At last, we came up with an answer that seemed to make sense. I asked for confirmation from another cacher and was told I was wrong, but only by one letter. It didn't actually make much of a difference in the final coordinates.
It was only a matter of physically grabbing the cache and signing the log...
I drove over to the cache site this evening looking for a legitimate place to park with access to the target area. After driving around for 10 minutes I setted for one with only the latter about a block away.
I avoided some local kids as I made my way to the cache site and spotted the obvious location. I reached in to grab the cache and felt something slide. Uh oh. I reached in again and felt nothing. Crap. I paniced and tried to think of a way to recover the cache. I know - a stick! I scrambled around, found one and poked at the cache to try to get it back. I think I only succeded in making it worse. What could I do? I know! A bigger stick! No, that didn't work either...
Then I remembered I had a ready-to-go replacement cache in my car that I had picked up from WalruZ's Magnetic Therapy cache. I had planned on placing a cache after this doing this one, but I though I could make things right by just replacing this one.
I walked all the way back to the car and returned to the cache location. I carefully placed the replacement and felt it grip. I took my hand off the cache and it immediately dissapeared, probably making the original cache even more hopeless. It was now dark and I was out of sticks, replacement caches and ideas.
Then it was only a matter of typing up the log and conveying the bad news... Of course I screwed that up too, deleting the whole thing when I had already written most of it. I suppose my penance is to retype it all.
Sorry about whole fiasco. I'm afraid to learn what the penalty is for destroying this cache... uh oh, I think I already know!
Posted by jeff at October 6, 2004 07:20 PM