In this first episode I talk about how I learned about geocaching and about how I finally got started playing it.
Places and Things Mentioned
– Veterans Tribute Park, St Charles, MO
Cache Highlight: “Ya Caught This Fish?“
Transcript
Welcome to geocache adventures with Me, shadowdragn1, where I talk about geocaching and my adventures with it.
I first heard of geocaching from a friend back in September 2014. I thought it sounded fun so I went to geocaching.com and setup an account and that was as far as I got. I had hoped it would be something that my husband and I could do together but he wasn’t really interested despite my attempts to get him to go try it with me so I kept putting off trying it. At the time my son was only a few months old and I wasn’t sure how to try geocaching with an infinite so I just gave up on the whole idea.
Fast forward about 5 years and I was trying to come up with some new activities I could do with my kiddo and I happened to remember about geocaching. I installed the app on my phone and turns out we had quiet a few caches near us. And on September 23 2019, almost exactly 5 years to the date, I went out with my son and we found our first cache together.
Normally I will put in a spoiler disclaimer before talking about any cache specifics so people can choice to skip over the cache details incase they decide to look it up and go find it. However, since this particular cache I am going to discuss has been archived and is no longer available for finding, I’m going to skip the disclaimer this time.
The first cache that we found was located at Veterans Tribute Park in St Charles County, Missouri. There is a link to the parks webpage in the show notes. If you’re in the area it’s a great park to check out
The cache was called “Ya Caught This Fish?”, cache ID GC7zEXZ, it has now archived
Difficulty rating 2, Terran rating 2.
The description read: “This is my second cache. Located in a beautiful new park. Feel Free to tell me if I’m doing anything wrong. Cache is located in a small key container. BYOP. Have fun caching”.
The hint given was: Whats up dock
At the park there is a beautiful pound with a fishing dock. The geocaching app showed the pin location near the dock which made the clue make sense. My plan was to quickly find the cache and then take my son over the playground to play. What I thought would be a quick find ended up taking about 20 minutes or so. The pin showed the location on the left hand side of the dock but we just couldn’t find it. We looked all around the area the pin was shown, looked in the weeds thinking maybe the key box had been knocked off, we walked up and down the dock looking for a magnet box on all the rails and just couldn’t find anything. I was getting frustrated and the kiddo was bored and badly wanted to go to the park. I was on the verge of giving up and taking him to the park when I decided to look at the app again and this time started scrolling through the logs left by the other cachers. I noticed there were a few logs stating that the coordinates were off a bit and finally found one that said the cache was actually located on the other side of the dock from what the pin showed. Thanks to the comments the other cachers left we were able to narrow down the search field significantly and finally found the magnetic key box. My son and I were both super happy that we had finally found it and signed the log. Having finally accomplished what we set out to do, we went over to the playground just played for a while.
After that I was hooked. I really enjoy geocaching. As of this recording, I’m currently up to 52 finds and 2 hide so I’m still fairly new at it. Sometimes I do it with my son. Sometimes I do it on my own. When we’re out and about and I notice a quick park and grab on the app, my husband has been a good sport about stopping by it when we have time and letting me and our son go find it. He’s even done a couple of finds with us but he’s still just not interested in it. Which is fine. Like I’ve said he’s been a good sport and has stopped not only at places in town when we’re running errands but also he’s stopped at a few in southern Missouri when we’ve gone down there for family events. He understands it’s something that our son and I really like to do and he’s being supportive of that which I do really appreciate so shout out to him for that.
So that wraps up our first episode of Geocache Adventures with me, Shadowddragn1. Feel free to reach out to me on my geocache profile or at Geocacheadventures.org. I hope you enjoyed this first episode and thank you for listening.
Geocache Adventures 
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