Here are two amazing stories from Geocaching logs I saw this week.

The first was a guy who lifted up a random light pole cover in a parking lot to demonstrate where people sometimes hide caches and actually found a cache – mine!

3 PM Some friends and I came to this “Museum” after lunch and I was showing them how some of the geocaches could be hidden. Well, guess what? Look there is a chache here! How surprising! No GPS, no coordinates, didn’t even know there was a cache here! (I did have my GPS in the car, though). Oh, well. I took nothing, left a penny, and signed the log. I then looked up the cache and found out it was a multi. I do know where all the answers are though (and I do own an Apple I ) . So I did it a little backwards and got cache #296. It counts. Thanks for the cache and interesting adventure!

The second is the story of a guy (not me) who decides to take a “shortcut” through the woods, falls off a cliff and continues on to the cache.

TFTC! An early morning hike and cache that went very wrong. Originally thought somehow that the trail to this was off of the main road: another lesson for me to read the logs first that I won’t soon forget this time. I decided to try to orienteer my way down to the cache from the main road (my first mistake in judgement.) When I got near the cache, I tried to work my way along a steep slope, (my second and REALLY bad mistake in bad judgement.) The earth gave way and I wound up sliding down the slope about 10 feet, and then there was no more slope! I fell another 15 or 20 feet after that onto loose earth. I sled down feet first with my front against the slope. I landed hard, but was fortunate not to break anything. My back was (is) VERY SORE , but my legs were not hurt at all, and after a few minutes of taking stock of myself (First Aid training came in REAL handy today!) I knew with confidence that I could walk out even if I found no help along the way, which proved to be the case. It took me 2 searches to find my glasses, which made me feel even better. The sore muscles made breathing a pain and I tried to limit myself to short shallow breaths. I must have taken about 3 hours to slowly walk out back to the car parked at the gate from the cache, with lots of stops that didn’t do much to make my back feel better. At the end, I walked along with both hands pressing against my lower back to try to support the aching muscles.
Otherwise the walk was beautiful. Amazing how you can still aprreciate a beautiful day in the woods when you are hurting ….
The show must go on: despite (or maybe because of) the pain, I still went up to the cache and took the Jeep Travel Bug. However, I did pass on taking pictures ….
The rest of the day has been spent laying in the tub in hot water or laying on the back porch couch with a heating pad under my back. Wearing the backbrace helps me get about.

In his defense, it was a really nice spot!