Since I figured we'd do the tour of the campus finding all the bears, we headed to the posted coordinates on this one first. We carefully chose a parking spot that was reserved for service vehicles, but only M-F 9-5.
We found the first spot easily enough and did the calculations for the second. On the way to the second we saw another bear and thought we may have miscalculated. The correct bear was there though.
We had lots of problems with the calculations for the 3rd bear though. Our initial coordinates put us off campus. Then we sat down to try to come up with better onces. On the latitude, I failed my order of operations test and multiplied before I divided. Some parentheses would help here. On the longitude, we were confused by the lack of multiplication operators. I thought it meant just stick a 7 and 10 to the front of the numbers, but those don't come out right. They should be written as N37.52.(2*A+(7/3)*D) W122.15.(7*B+10*D).
We finally figured out the intended coordinates and found the bear and then the next one without incident (at least on this particular cache).
Our car was parked near here, so we went back to it only to find a Berkeley Parking Officer ticketing our car. What the? The sign says reserved M-F 9-5 only? The guy says there are are OTHER signs when you come in that say you need a permit to park anywhere. OK, whatever. Anybody have any success appealing these things?
We got the hell off campus and found a place to park to look up the final info. (In retrospect, it probably made sense to just leave the car there since we already had a ticket.) I did some research beforehand and I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I needed to go. I looked up the websites on my phone and did the calculations, double-checking my math.
We weren't far away from my calculated coordinates, so we decided to hoof it a few blocks. We ended up in the dumpiest part of frat row, clearly the wrong place for a cache. Out of ideas for solving the cache, we decided to head back on to campus for some other caches and on the way by a spot I had seen last week when driving through here that could be the right spot for the cache.
As we walked we noticed a lot of people marching in the same general direction, many of them very hippie-looking. Then we saw signs for event parking and asked someone what was going on. Widespread Panic concert. That explains the hippies.
Anyway, on way in we went by the spot I remembered. I decided to give it a check; what the heck. I kicked around a bit and suddenly a cache popped out! I wasn't quite sure if it was the right cache, but later confirmed that through the logs. Amazing. So what did I find all those bears for?
The quote of the day was "For being incompetent, we're pretty good!"
Posted by jeff at July 10, 2005 02:48 PM