Our first cache hide was finally approved: GC16HJZ

I’ll post some pictures later on tonight.

Woo-hoo! 200 finds as of this afternoon. A FTF (first to find) on Thursday, another FTF on Saturday, and 14 total caches on the weekend.

Here’s some photos of us celebrating 200 at the cache site (“Vancouver Decachelon — Bramble Scramble”, GCG809):

You can check out our stats or a map of our finds.

Oops, missed it.

This past weekend was busy. On Saturday, Gwen had a choir practice, then her hip-hop class (seriously) and after that, we all packed it up and headed to Port Moody for our first geocaching event!

The caching event was the GeocoinFest Multi Event (GC14J5X). The event consisted of a bunch of geocoin collectors getting together and showing off their coins. On top of that, there were two local vendors, Landsharkz and Worldcaching, and just general cachers from around “Metro Vancouver”. It was essentially a meet-and-greet in a small scout hall with a few dozen cachers. There was also the opportunity to “discover” all the coins and a number of travel bugs by writing down all the tracking numbers of everything there, but that seems a bit like cheating to me. We’ll continue to discover only those things that we actually discover at caches.

We met some of the cachers whose names we recognized from various caches, and I have to say that I was surprised that many of them were younger than I expected. Also, a good deal of the cachers seem to be middle-aged women, once again proving that I know nothing.

We bought a number of things from the vendors, including a number of cool geocoins and some other trinkets:

• A small tube (see: buffalo tubes) that will be used as a micro cache somewhere around town.
• A first-to-find prize (a “BC in Blue” keychain) for our first cache hide.
• A neat gecko light that needs to be seen to understand.

Sunday was, of course, Thanksgiving. What I didn’t mention was that Saturday night we spent (well, Gwen spent) making rolls and pies. A few dozen rolls (that turned out better than any Gwen’s done before!), 2 apple pies, and 2 pumpkin pies. I wasn’t a complete bad husband — I peeled, chopped, and prepared the apple pie filling — but Gwen did the lion’s share. On Sunday, the turkey was stuffed and prepared before Gwen went off to church, leaving me to put it in the oven and, um, supervise its cooking.

In the end, I think it turned out pretty well:

We had Carla and Tomer, and The Vet and The Brit over for dinner and after-dinner Wii and euchre. Fun times. Bowling, Smooth Moves, and Brain Academy. Fortunately there’s no video evidence.

Monday was shockingly fine and sunny … so we went caching! We headed down to the south shore of Vancouver (on the north bank of the north arm of the Fraser) and picked up a bunch of caches. We met a group of people at a cache called “Kid Cache”. These people were huddled around a single GPS. A mother, father, a set of grandparents, a toddler Aidan’s age, and an infant — quite a sight and not exactly inconspicuous. It was pretty obvious what they were doing so we offered some assistance. The cache was an easy find (Gwen found it!) and the other caching group joined up with us as we collected a few others in the park. It wasn’t our first experience meeting other cachers while on the hunt, but it was the first time we found other caches as a group. It was fun, and as it turned out, the other cachers were newbies … the Kid Cache was only their 7th find. After 3 DNFs the day before, I think these three finds buoyed their spirits considerably.

On the river bank, there was some drift wood that sure looked like a Sad Goat:

And now, we’ve prepped and placed a cache nearby — our first! — and if it passes the review process, I’ll blog a bit about it.

TTFN!

When Aidan woke up this morning, at 5:30am, I bet he didn’t think that we’d get him up, fed, dressed, and stuffed in the truck.

As a matter of fact, neither did I.

But, hey, that’s how things go. We were intending to head down to Seattle today to do some cross-border shopping with our recently superior Loonie, and we intended to head down early, but I was thinking somewhere between 8am and 9am. By 9am today, we were almost in Bellingham with four caches under our belt. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The boy woke up at 5:30am, and didn’t go back to sleep. After some discussion, we decided to get up and get moving. Of course, Aidan calling “Change the bed!” helped getting us moving too. Note to selves, no-name diapers really don’t do well for overnight. We were actually on the road by 6:30am, much to my shock. Both Gwen and Aidan were awake — and happy?!?

The reason we wanted to be away early was because of The Border. On a good day, Seattle’s about 2 1/2 hours away. A “good day” means spending 5 minutes at the border. Last weekend at the peak rush, simply crossing The Border meant waiting 2-3 hours in itself. Clearly this is untenable with a toddler, so we aimed to avoid the rush. Not that we knew when the rush actually was, but a good rule of thumb seems like “earlier is better”. And then there’s the decision: Which crossing? Peace Arch? Pacific Highway (aka the Truck Crossing)? As it turns out, at 7:15am today the wait was only 30 minutes at the Truck Crossing.

Of course, that meant we were in Blaine before 8am. Less than 2 hours to Seattle … and it’s a Sunday … and the Seattle Premium Outlets don’t open until 10am. What to do?!?

Geocaching of course! We had loaded the GPS up with a bunch of close-to-I-5 caches, and before we knew it we had four in hand and it wasn’t 9am yet. Woot!

We continued south, with ongoing success with the caches. Now, what I haven’t mentioned so far is the rain. Pouring yesterday, pouring today. In fact, today was quite a bit worse than yesterday. I was fighting with the car, the wind, and the rain the whole day. It also makes for damp caching, so by the time we reached Bellingham, we let up on the caching and drove south.

I’ll spare you the details about shopping, but we did pick up sneakers and lots of clothes. It’s like Christmas time! Clothes (and cars, apparently) are some of the few things that actually cost significantly less in the States.

Coming back up I-5 meant picking up caches on the other side of the road! :)

Of course crossing The Border in a northerly direction causes some trepidation too … when’s the rush back into Canada? Which crossing (again)? How much tax/duty will we have to pay? We debated eating supper before making the trek back home, but one thing lead to another, and we ended up queued at the Truck Crossing again without having eaten supper. Actually, the crossing north wasn’t too bad, something like 40 minutes. The actual exchange with the CBS agent went something like: CBSA: Where do you live? A: Vancouver, CBSA: Where’d ya go? A: Seattle, CBSA: Value? A: About $600, CBSA: Good day.

That’s it. No passports, no receipts, not even complete questions or sentences!!! Ah well. Happy to be home.

Gwen will have more to say about the trip. I think she has some funny anecdotes to share.

PS: 8 cache finds today, 1 TB dropped off, 4 picked up. Nothing compared to the 26 that EastCoastTwo picked up today on Easy Street! That brings them to 110, just slightly fewer than our 175. They should eclipse us by the end of October! Congrats M&D!