Sara and I have done it! We set out a goal of finding (and contributing to every geocache on Bainbridge island) and last week, we completed it. For those of you who don’t know what geocaching is, it’s basically a treasure hunt where you get geo-coordinates and have to find a small cache of “stuff” - generally a logbook and a few toys or nic-naks that kids can trade out for stuff that they bring with them. They range from pretty easy to exceedingly hard some are at the coordinates provided, others involve multiple steps and riddles - just like treasure island.
All in, there are around 40 geocaches on Bainbridge island and we were only generally able to get 2-3 caches per day. So this was quite the undertaking and it’s taken us the better part of the summer including a few after school hunts and a number of marathon Saturday hunts to get the caches on the more remote parts of the island. Jane joined for many of them - of which her contributions were little but the complexity increased dramatically.
Here are a few of the fun ones:
In Fort Ward park, there is a mailbox that’s setup in the middle of the forest. The top box is the logbook and the bottom one is the cache itself. You could probably find this one without the coords, but it would be tough!
In the middle of grand forest west, you bushwack fo a quarter mile to arrive at the forest maiden. The cache is in a box directly below the maiden. Just a fancy wood carving attached to a tree in the middle of the forest!
There was an urban “micro” cache attached to a pole of a stop sign. This was the smallest one we found - just a rolled up piece of paper for the log.
Sara created a geocaching kit - which involved her toys for swapping but also included gloves and glasses after a cache we found was covered in tree sap. As we continued, she added things like bug spray and calamine lotion. Be Prepared!
This one was a riddle, you had to decode the code on pole outside and it lead you to a specific book in the public library. Inside the book, was a cut out and the geocache inside the book!
And the best for last, this geocache was at Bay, Hay, and Feed. You pick up the receiver and it provides you with a clue which, when combined with a second clue in the geo-cache app, tells you the code. You put the code into the telephone dialpad and the bottom of the telephone opens up to reveal the cache. It was aptly named the “Dr Who” cache.
I guess we will need to take our geocaching somewhere else from here on out!