Geocaching is a new hobby of mine. I just started this spring. I became fairly fanatical about it early on and had a few days where I hit 10 geocaches in a day. This was exhausting to my wife, and my son. I thought it made for a fairly full day too.

Crap. Let me rewind a little bit here. Geocaching is a sport...or hobby ( I think that is up for debate) in which people use global positioning, much like the GPS in your car, to find happy meal toys in ammo crates. In spite of what I just typed, I swear its a really fun thing. People hide these "caches" in very clever spots and mark their location with a handheld GPS receiver. Then they publish these results on geocaching.com. People, like myself, then go an download coordinates, and find the caches. I have done a pretty poor job of describing this, but for more info go to www.geocaching.com to find out more. Its really cool, I promise.

So a guy from work found out I was into geocaching, largely because his cousin is the local geocaching (Andy) expert and I have pestered him with all my noob questions. The guy from work and I spoke a little about caching, and about six weeks ago, he asked me if I would go with him and his cousin to Indy to grab 100 geocaches in a day. Um...yeah! But immediately I was like "try for 100, get 55." At this point, I had been geocaching for a few months and only gotten 60 or so geocaches. The date was set for July 3. We were going to try and be in Indy at 6 AM. Since my grandparents live near Indy, and near xpunkx(resident geocaching expert)'s parents we would go down on the evening of the second and spend the night.

Weeks went by and July 2 arrived. Cory (the guy from work) and I left my house at about 6:30. We hit a couple of geocaches on the way to my grandparents, and arrived around 8:30. It was also planned to do a mission briefing for the following day that evening.

The weeks went by and July 2 arrived. Cory and I left. On the way to my grandparents we snagged a couple of geocaches. It it was also good to get some "dirt" on everyone and get to know Cory a bit more.

When I got to my grandma and grandpa's house, they were really excited to see us, and then really disappointed when we left after about 20 seconds to go to the camp for "debriefing". Cory and I met up with his uncle, and got the 2 minute tour of the camp. The place has these really great taxidermy animals including an elephant, hippo, rhino and giraffe. I met Andy here. It was weird hearing the voice of the geocaching podcast, but not from a speaker. It was weird to know that he was a stranger in that moment but in 24 hours we would have gone through a ton of stress, excitement and wear together. There was also this guy Josh too. Josh is awesome, but more on that later. When we arrived back at my grandparents, spoke to them for 10 minutes, ate their ice cream and then went to bed. It was really rude, honestly. Sorry grandma.

I went to bed, but my mind was racing. I rehearsed my day to try and fall asleep. The thought of being really tired kept repeating. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I woke up in the middle of the night, but then I realized I needed to get up in the middle of the night. I checked the time and sure enough...it was time to get up. Four thirty we left for the day. Grandma was up to see us on our way and she had started brewing a pot of coffee for me, which I had to refuse. Again, very rude of me.

We hit the road and nailed a few "LPC's". That means nothing to 99.9999% of the readers. It was going well though. I had my Garmin Oregon loaded thanks to Andy and I was also using my Droid Incredible. I actually let Josh use my Oregon, because he is awesome. But again, more on that later.

Our group included Andy, his dad, Cory, Josh and myself. Everyone played a key piece. Cory was driving. He did so well. I had never seen a Dodge Caravan defy gravity like Cory was able to make it do. Andy's dad rode shotgun, and did some navigating. Andy logged caches. He also did all the mapping of the caches prior to the run. His ground work made this possible. I checked the navigation, and was a little more slow and methodical with approaching caches so when everyone went to the obvious spot, I went to the correct spot.

Josh gets his own paragraph. This guy is a ball of energy. He found 3/4 of the caches, without a GPS. He could smell the caches it seemed. Josh sat in the back seat of the van, but was always the first one out. He was pure energy. But most of all he was selfless and very kind. I really like Josh the geocacher, and really really like Josh the person. I think all the parts of the hunt were critical, but Andy and Josh were the main players. Andy's groundwork and Josh's energy were essential.

Everyone got tired, but the grind continued. We ended up in some sketchy areas but landed 108 caches. This was a couple of weeks ago now. I started this post a while ago, and let it sit too long. This post doesn't do the day justice really. It was a lot of fun and I got to meet some great people. But the weird part is the most memorable thing from the day is the efforts my grandma made to make me comfortable and happy, and my insulting response. I am afraid I made a withdrawl there. Just a good reminder of what is really important. Sometimes agendas get in the way of relationships. That is bad business.

More blogs, soon.

Later,

Kratz