Paul Monaco .com

With such a cute name George Curious, how could I resest hunting this cache down!

Well, after watching this video you’ll agree that maybe I should have done this one on a different day.  I actually picked this cache because it had pretty much guaranteed me a nice 3 mile hike and excercise is certainly something I can use!

It started off very well on  our Rail to Trails network and was only about a thenth of a mile off the main trail, it should have been reasonably easy.

Not even half way up though I realized I didn’t have my cell phone with me anymore.  I know I left a twitter message when I started but couldn’t remember if that was from the car or en route.  The more I walked the more I belived it fell out of my pocket and that pretty much occupied my mind.

When I got to the location it was very uncomfortable.  The nice spring I was looking for had apparantly turned into a tick infested pool of stagnent water.  I looked but honestly between being bummed about my phone and being eaten alive by who knows what, my heart just wasn’t into it.  So I wrapped up and headed back to the car hoping to find my phone along the way.. which I didn’t

When I got home my house phone was ringing.. caller ID said it was me!!!  “Hello?  You found my phone!!!!?”  Turns out a homeless man was on the trail with his bicycle travelling back to the homeless shelter when he found my phone.  I was saavy enough to look at the address book and call the entry labeled “home” and ta da!!!!  So I drove to the shelter to retrieve my phone and give him a nice little reward which I think he really appreciated.

Looks like a little buddhism at work here, turning the poison of an uncomfortable treck through the woods into medicine by exchange goodwill with someone less fortunate.  NMRK

What a beautiful day for geocaching, but let me tell you it didn’t start off so well.  Eager to hit the road and made a quick dash to pick up Dan and we proceeded to use a strip mall parking lot as a staging area to load up on fresh batteries and get all our coordinates programmed.  So as I put batteries in my 10-year old GPS unit I notice they weren’t quite snug.  Now this is a problem I’ve had with it for a while now and if the battery isn’t tight it would shut itself off.  So as I’ve done countless times before I reformed the retainer clip that holds the batteries.  Well.. It was reformed just one to many times and it busted.

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