The Set Up

During the last portion of dead time at work, Wendy and I had begun playing with some of the puzzle caches to see if we could solve them and get the caches off our lists. One of them being the Eagle Eye Stash cache (GCGGXG). Wendy was the one who successfully came out with the coords and explained how it worked. Having it solved was one thing, going to get it was another. During the same week, some other cachers by the team name of BenandTina had also solved the puzzle. We've met up with them a couple of times at an event as well as at a night time cache we knew they were going to be at and Wendy knows them through past friendships and it was mentioned that we should all try and go at the same time for this cache as well. Well, we finally decided to do it this Sunday and Cano will also be joining us. There will be 7 of us total as Meredith is working so I'll have the kids with me. It should be very fun and hopefully quite memorable as it will be my 500th cache. Thats not a huge milestone for a lot of people but for me right now, its kind of important. I was only at 186 with two events under my belt at the beginning of 2009. Having started caching in 2005, this wasn't anythin spectacluar. I had just purchased my new GPS last fall which prompted me to cache a lot more to try and get my moneys worth out of it. Looking back now at the stats for this year, I have had 291 finds with 3 events. I was sitting at 489 at the beginning of this week and decided that I wanted the Eagle Eye Stash to the big one. I respect the owner and his philosophy on caching, particularly on hides themselves, and am very impressed with his GSAK abilities, so I figured I'd make his a my milestone. In order to make this happen, I needed to get 10 caches on my day off so that I would be sitting at 499 for Sunday.
My day off goes this way...
Cooper had spent Wednesday night at the apartment so I had to run over the house first thing in the morning and get Cosmo to bring the duo to daycare. After I got them off, I went back to the house to take care of some bill box cleaning before heading out. I got done some of what I needed to and starting planning out the 10 that I could do to get all set up. I ran back to the apartment, got into my caching clothes, and headed out. I looked at caches around Route 46 as I had a bunch still printed in my car. I didn't really feel like heading out all the way towards Ellsworth again, knowing that the construction on Route 1 sucked the previous week, so I picked out a couple new ones that I hadnt done yet to start off with. Big mistake. By the time I had gotten to where the first was supposed to be, it was already 11:30. The gentleman that placed this is one that I don't know enough to understand some of his hides or hints. The cache was supposed to be in a stump. I searched every tree stump and fallen tree trunk within 50ft of where it was supposed to be wasting about 25 minutes. I didn't want to give up but I knew I had to move on to get 10 for the day. I continued down this dirt road towards another hide by the same person. Again, I don't know this person well enough to understand their thought process. The hint for this second one was "Dodge keeps my cache company". What the heck does that mean? There are no old pieces of a dodge here or anything...After spending another 30 minutes looking for a cache that just wasn't there, I felt like the day was going to be a bust. Two caches, two DNF's. How the hell am I going to get 10 when all the caches I planned on involved hikes?
Having given up on Hondohawk for the day because I just don't get him, I decided to go after Stone House Blues (GC4E32). I really screwed up on this one as well by entering in the wrong way. Looking at the map on my GPS, I thought I had pulled in to the dirt road that got me the closest I could and it being called Stone Hill Road, I figured I'd had it correct. The cache from where I parked was like 1.35 miles away. I started the trek up what is basically a small mountain, following what turned from a dirt road into a very lightly used 4x4 road. As I got a little ways up, I passed a truck on his way down and thought this must be the right way in if someone is coming down this way. It was a nice quiet walk once I hit the base of the blueberry fields. There were lots of birds picking away and I startled a ton of mice and chipmunks as I passed through the trees in between each field. Once I got about 3/4 of the way up, I got a really frustrated and realized that I had come for much longer of a walk than I needed to. I had reached a point where I could see what appeared to be the peak and what was down the slope from that a little but a damned Chevy Cavalier. I stopped for a minute, used my binoculars to see if maybe it was just a beater or abandond car that someone brought up but it was someones daily driver. What the hell? I enoyed the quiet hike up but have to admit, because I was trying to get 10 caches today and failed on the first two, I was pretty upset with my goof. As I continued up towards the Stonehouse cache, I started to think about what I had just done and looking around, thought it really wasn't that bad of a mistake. The little tiny optomist came out in me...I wasn't at work dealing the the stress, I was doing something I enjoy, I was in a place where I could see for miles and miles, a on a nice crisp October day, and it was quiet. After putting this spin on things, I picked up the pace a little to the Stonehouse. I quickly found the first cache, grabbed some Cabella's coins out of it and signed the log. Here are some of the surroundings at the location...

This was tipped over with a bunch of targets that had been taped to it at one point but had fallen off. The table had been shot up pretty good and had obviously been someones flamming beer pong table at one time.

It appeared that while people were up were hanging out and camping that if they had something that would burn, it was in fact burned...


After getting the three different caches that were up here on the mountain, I worked my way back to Bangor via Rt 46 and some other smaller roads to make sure I got the ten caches I needed. Although some were GRC's and others were easily obtained micros, I was able to complete the day to make it so that Sunday was exactly what I wanted it to be...Number 500 with a fun group of people.