Musings about Geocaching: 2005-04-24

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

I had another Geocaching dream last night

Almost every night, from the first day I went out on a Geocache hunt last January 17, I have had a Geocaching dream. I've never been involved in something that has so fully taken over my psyche that it invades my sleep time every single night.

Only on a couple of occasions have I been able to remember the details, and at the time, I didn't write those dreams down, so I don't remember the specifics.

Last night's dream had something to do with the cache I looked for, and couldn't find, yesterday. Normally that wouldn't be such a big deal. I've had several DNFs, but in this case, my little blue, unhappy icon, is one of about five in a row . . . except for a note from the last person to find it, who "rehid it better."

The dreams don't seem to care whether I've been out on a real cache hunt during the day, or I've been on the computer and in the Forums most of the day. I still dream about Geocaching.

I wonder if this occurs with other Geocachers, or other people with other activities. Even when I had my horses, I don't think I dreamed about them very frequently. Although, after I had to sell them, I continued to have "horse dreams" for many, many years.

Seems like since I started Geocaching, the "horse dreams" have finally stopped.

Sunday, April 24, 2005

The one day I cache with someone else, I get hurt

Because I thought his children would enjoy Geocaching, I went out with a friend today. We went up Sloan canyon since there is a nice series of different caches.

We went to the Sloan Canyon cache first and his son is a natural. He looked just a little harder in an area his father already glanced at, but the boy saw the cache.

From there we went to Al's Cache. This time it was dad who saw the cache, or the critter . . . From there we went on to Woody's Way where we ran into FlagMan and Duscwe! That was great! They are really nice guys and were so friendly, I thought they knew my friend from somewhere else. They introduced themselves and were talking while I was giving directions to a guy who had driven up and asked about hiking trails.

From there we went on down to "Who Knew Blue" revisited. We used the "Finder's Tree" method here. Angel saw the cache first, then I saw it, so the two of us moved away and watched the two guys continue looking. The ammo can had some good stuff in it so we all traded for something. I got a "two pence" coin. Finally, we headed up the steep little trail and down the road to Chuy's new nano cache at the end of the road. That was the teeniest, tiniest little cache I've ever seen!

On our way out, I thought I spotted a place where I could put a cache and so we stopped and walked around for a while and finally placed my small Tupperware container betwen some larger rocks and covered it with some smaller ones from the nearby stream bed.

My friend and his kids walked back to the car as I was checking the cammo job on the hide. I took a step sideways and my knee gave out. It folded up to the inside just as easily as if it was supposed to bend that way.

I fell, my camera hit a nearby rock, and I ended up in a crumple in the dirt. I seriously didn't know if I could get up.

It didn't hurt excruciatingly as I expected it to. Slowly I moved the leg out from beneath me. With great care I stood back up and then hobbled very, very slowly back to the car.

Right now I have a pair of crutches, much-needed, standing up in the corner of my room. On my knee I have an ACE knee brace, along with an ice pack. I'll be keeping the ice on my knee for the next day or so to take down the swelling. The healing is likely to take a long time.

I won't be climbing any mountains for quite a while and won't trust my knee to hold me up for a long time after it betrayed me today.