Tiffany,+Kelly,+Amber,+Kim

Those Classy Cachers! By: Amber McNeill, Kim Johnson, Kelly Stajduhar, Tiffany Jackson



A Night of Mishaps and Misfits So there we were… holding our second, and last, cache in our hands. Who knew a crumpled, blood stained piece of paper could be so gratifying? But wait, let’s rewind to the purpose behind this story. We will start with an introduction to the birth of this tale. This is the story of 4 girls who were given an assignment. Classy Cachers 1-4 were given the task of geocaching for their Social Studies class. What is geocaching, you might ask? Well, geocaching is a worldwide scavenger hunt. It can be used for educational purposes, or just to have fun. So back to the story, some of the cachers were super excited about this task, and the others found it daunting. “I don’t have time for this”, said Number 4. “This is going to be AWESOME!” said Number 2. And the story goes…

As we were walking from class one day, one of us mentioned the geocaching assignment. “We should do it at night!” I said. There was a quick vote and it was settled. We would go geocaching that night. Number 1 and Number 3 looked up caches on the geocaching website. It was about 9:00pm. We decided to head to Fuquay. I sat in the front seat with the GPS in hand; Number 1 drove and Numbers 3 and 4 were in the backseat. We had four cache coordinates written down. I typed in the coordinates of the first while Numbers 3 and 4 decoded the clues.

Our first attempt had failed miserably. For the first cache, we entered the address of theFuquayPark into our navigation system. We thought we were headed toward the park; instead we ended up at a brick office building. Apparently the information had been typed in wrong, but no one was pointing any fingers. With disappointment from the first cache, we decided to try the second. It was a fire station. “This should be interesting”, we thought. The notes for this cache said to use stealth. Use stealth? Great. We weren’t the stealthiest bunch of people.

The navigation system brought us to the right place this time. We pulled up to the fire station and parked in a less than desirable parking lot across the street (the cache’s notes also warned against parking in the station’s parking lot). I entered the coordinates into the GPS while Number 4 read us the clue for this one. Before we could even get out of the car, the sirens began wailing and the fire trucks sped down the street. Here we were trying to be stealthy and the darn fire trucks scared the life out of us. “Let’s just do this”, Number 1 said with part hesitation and part determination on her breath.

The GPS led us around the back of the fire station. It wasn’t the most ideal situation, but it was safe right? There were cops and firemen around. Already on edge from the sirens, we walked quickly but quietly toward the waypoint. It was dark and silent outside, until a loud machinery noise squealed into existence. This caused Number 1 to squeal quite loudly also. “Shhhh” I told her. “We’re probably not even supposed to be back here. Why else would we have to use ‘stealth’?” We got closer and closer to the waypoint. 180 feet. 100 feet. 72 feet. The GPS was leading us up an embankment of gravel. At the top of the hill, there was an old shed with broken down cars and machinery. Number 1, the horror movie buff, began listing all the terrible things that could possibly happen if we continued on our path. We didn’t have flashlights, nor did we have self defense knowledge. 72 feet was as close as we came to cache #2 that night.

Two down, two to go. It was getting late and we were feeling a little defeated; although, we at least got closer with the second attempt than the first one. Before we tried for the next two, we stopped at Cookout to get milkshakes; liquid courage,Campbell style. I was busy playing with the GPS and Numbers 3 and 4 were working on the next clues. All of a sudden Number 1 slammed on brakes. As headlights came toward us, we came to a screeching halt. Three feet away from our front bumper was the truck we had almost had a head on collision with in the turning lane. We sat in silence. Not a word was said until we pulled up to the speaker to order our much deserved treat. “What else could possibly happen?” said Number 1.

To take a break for a few minutes, Number 1 whipped the car into a spot in a nearby Walgreens. As soon as the car was in park, I looked up and let out a light shriek. Being best friends, we all knew each other’s likes, dislikes, fears, and phobias. What I had just seen in the window of Walgreens was sure to scare Number 1. Before I could warn her, she looked up to see her biggest fear… a clown. This wasn’t just any clown. This was a Halloween decoration straight out of //It//. The clown had fangs and claws, among many other things. So we were off. I set the coordinates of our next destination and we left. We had no idea where we were headed. We didn’t have an address to this cache because all we knew was that it was at a diner. The navigation system couldn’t help us now. I was directing Number 1 where to go based on the waypoint from the GPS. Thankfully, we were able to get there without any troubles. We pulled up to the diner and parked with the headlights facing the building (we didn’t have any flashlights, remember?) This cache was supposed to be hidden in a peanut butter jar and the clue was ‘ramp it up’. Obviously, the cache was somewhere on, under, or around the ramp to the entrance. How hard could it be to find a peanut butter jar on a ramp? We looked for at least 30 minutes. Using a flashlight app on a phone to see where the headlights couldn’t reach was what we had come down to. Ant hills, beer bottles, and despair were all we found with cache #3. We were all around the cache, the GPS said we were right on top of it, yet we never found it. “This is aggravating”, Number 4 said. “Tell me about it. I just stepped in the same ant hill three times!” I said.

We didn’t have a specific address for cache #4 either, so we relied on following the GPS once again. It took us to Food Lion; the back of Food Lion to be exact. The only hint from the cache website was, ‘no hents needed’. Now, we didn’t know if the misspelling of ‘hints’ //was// a hint, but it didn’t help us either way. Number 1 parked the car where the GPS got the lowest number reading. There was a family of deer standing just off to the side of the woods not 30 feet away. She honked the horn to see if they would scatter. They didn’t. Seeing as how the deer were not skittish, we decided to wait until they passed to get out of the car. I didn’t want to be attacked by deer, and with our night going the way it was, it most certainly could have happened. We walked around with the GPS until it was clearly leading us to a light pole. We searched all around it for a few minutes. There are only so many places you can hide something on a light pole. We lifted up a metal covering on the bolts and there it was, our first taste of victory. The magnetic cache was the size of a thumbnail. We opened it up and recorded our presence on the tiny, rolled up slip of paper and placed it back as we had found it. Finally…we found one. We were feeling a little excitement from our first find, so we had the idea to try another attempt at cache #1.

I typed the coordinates of the Park cache into the GPS. We weren’t going to mess with the address or navigation system again. The GPS seemed to be getting us around with no worries. We arrived at the ‘park’, but the park wasn’t a park at all. It was merely a parking lot with a trellis and some greenery. This cache didn’t come with a hint because it said it was already too easy to find. Boy did we prove them wrong. The GPS led us to the trellis covered walkway, but it started going crazy once we got there. We were getting poked and prodded by thorns in the greenery, we were getting creepy looks from the man outside the gaming lounge across the street, and we were getting tired after hours of hunting. We were about to give up when Number 1 shouted, “I found it!”

The cache was a tiny tin box magnetically adhered to the underside of a bench. Opening it up, Number 3 pulled out a small plastic bag containing three pieces of paper. The papers were crinkled and stained with what looked like dirt, blood, and other forms of liquid. We all took a look at the papers, signed our names, and placed them back in to their baggy. We sat there on the bench for a few minutes, taking in our second victory. We had redeemed ourselves from the first attempt.

The tiny box was placed back under the bench and we set off for campus. No more navigation system, no more GPS, and no more roaming in the dark. We had accomplished our task. So you now see how a crumpled, blood stained piece of paper can be so gratifying.