Leap Day

February 29, 2016

 

What better way to spend this extra day of the year than to go geocaching! Our local friend and renowned geocache owner, Brian, met us at our condo and we all took off for Lehigh Acres.

 

 

We found a total of 20 geocaches—some of which were puzzles that we had to solve before we could get the final coordinates to put into our GPS devices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cordell and I completed a challenge that required us to find a geocache every day of the calendar year. We had every day except February 29^th filled in for the past three months. We were glad that this was a Leap Year because we had one shot to do it, or wait another 4 years for the opportunity. We were just one of the 5,698 geocachers who needed just ONE find on Leap Day to fill their 366 Days-of-the-Year grid.

We earned a special virtual souvenir for finding a cache on Leap Day.

 

Leap Day 2016

 

 

With the 5 of us searching, each of us found at least one cache before the others had spotted it.
 

 
 

Jim was on a roll and he saw some that the rest of us missed.

 

Jim and Barb reached a milestone when they found their 200^th geocache.

 

 

My personal favorite find of the day was for a cache named Outback Cache which had a 4 out of a 5 difficulty rating. Caches rated like this usually take a good amount of time to find and often result in a DNF (Did Not Find). After reading the hint, I knew exactly want I was going to be looking for. I really like the clever way some cache owners tie names and hints together and this one was: “What is most popular type of entree item at the restaurant that shares this cache's name?” As soon as we arrived at the site, I saw two wooden surveyors type stakes with yellow ribbons tied to them. When I pulled up one of the stakes, there was a small geocache attached to the bottom part that went into the ground.

 

 

We were glad to avenge a Do Not Find on a cache that we missed when we were caching with Brian earlier in the month.

 

 

We had a difficult time finding one cache that had a decoy placed at the site. After a long and thorough search, Brian finally saw what the rest of us had passed by more than once.

 

 

We packed lunches so that we could have more time caching rather than taking time to eat in a restaurant. Besides, it was such a warm sunny day that we were loathe to go inside. And so, we stopped at the same 7-11 where we had eaten with Brian the last time we were in the area.

 

 

We often see interesting things while out geocaching and today I spied this pretty red wild flower that I was not able to identify. Barb and I guessed that it must be in the poinsettia family.

 

 

Late afternoon, we went to the library where a geocaching event was held. We enjoyed meeting and conversing with other geocachers and were able to put faces to some of the names we have been seeing in geocache logs.

 

 

There is a very interesting geocache inside the library that we found last year. Since Barb has had a lot of experience shelving library books, she was able to find it very quickly. The name of the cache was ‘Due East, Ref. 349.73’ and she immediately knew where to go to look for it.

 

 

None of us wanted to give up this day, but we quit before we completely ran out of energy. Brian was able to stay and eat a rather late dinner with us at the condo. It was a very, very enjoyable day and we made hay while the sun shined!