Caching with Uncle Fun

Geocaching is a sport I have enjoyed for over six years now. In early 2003 I introduced my brother Dave to it and he quickly became hooked. Since all the nieces and nephews consider him the fun uncle, his caching name became Uncle Fun. A truer name was never given. Dave and I always find a way to work Geocaching into every visit we have with each other. While he, Tracy and Jamie were in town for their son Cory's drumline competition at Irondale High School, we took the opportunity to get out this morning to cache.

We hit the road by 6:00 am and did the first two caches by the light of our headlamps. That early in the morning it was also a bit chilly with the air temp at -2 and a -15 wind chill. That is what we both enjoy most about this sport, you are challenged by many things including the level of difficulty in the hide itself, the time of day, the weather and your own state of mind. Some caches you walk up to with an almost Zen like focus and you know were it is long before you ever see it. Others you can spend 20 minutes searching for and it ends of being right in front of you.

The highlight of the day was finding a cache that was a puzzle cache called Our Solar System, in which you had to find 9 caches, one named for each of the planets. At each one that was a piece of the puzzle such as X=3. Once we did all 9, we (and when I say we, I mean Uncle Fun!) had to do the math to calculate the final coordinates for the 10th cache. We went stomping off to find this one, the GPS's leading us into a large frozen wetland. No way someone would hide something here. It dawned on Dave that maybe there was a flaw in his calculations. Once back at the car he found the error and re-did the math. Being one digit off had put us over a mile away from where we needed to be. Our error corrected we navigated to the correct spot and found the cache. But wait, there was no log book so we though it had been stolen. Got back to the car only to read the print out that said if there is no log book, you did not find the correct container! So off we went again, this time finding a secondary container that was in fact the final. Success! We had a great time and as always look forward to our next caching adventure.

Uncle Fun with the cache container at Our Solar System