FTF

One of the “desired” goals for a geocacher is to be the First To Find a cache. There are people that get the emails publishing a new cache on their cell phones and spring into action. We on the other hand, take the Doris Day approach, Kay Sera Sera. If one happens to get published and is located where were were going anyway or is a suitable alternate location for caching, we’ll give it a try.

It almost happened while we were out west in Colorado, there were two that had not yet been found along our route one day. Unfortunately we ended up second on both finds, one by a day (hadn’t been logged online yet) and another by mere hours.

Last night a little before 11:00 PM a new cache email came in, it was only a little over a mile from home. We figured we’d got get it this weekend because we just knew somebody was probably on their way to go be the FTF right then.

This morning we looked at the logs for the cache, called “old ting,” and no one had rushed out last night to find it. We briefly thought about looking for it on our way to work, but it looked like it was on a dirt road and I had just washed the car…

At the end of the work day, no one had logged the find yet, so we drove by the spot to see if it was an easy spot on a drive by. There were some trees and a few bushes along a right of way, but we couldn’t spot it.

After dinner and because it is so close our house and to get there it meant a walk along the dirt roads of the horse district, my wife and I headed out to see if we could find it.

Wen we arrived at the corner our GPSr was indicating GZ about 20′ into the side lawn of a house. Realizing that the first 8-10 feet off the road is a right of way and not necessarily homeowner property we poked about along the tree line + and – 40′ to no avail.

Didn’t find the cache, but I did find a cell phone in a bush on the north side of the property’s driveway. For a second I thought, “Oooh, clever hide,” but the phone had no contact called “old ting” or “geocache” or “GC1TH5W”, just a bunch of back and forth calls between the owner and Deidre…

My wife, the shy retiring person she is, knocked on the homeowner’s door and asked if they had ever heard of geocaching. Either A) he genuinely didn’t know anything or B) he does and is in on it. I had my own question, “Did anyone in the household lose a cell phone?” The same A & B possibilities applied for this as well.

When we got home and checked the logs to see if someone had found it, there was a note from a volunteer geocaching reviewer marking the cache as unavailable, because of experiences similar to ours from other people.