Times keeps jumping on the bandwagon - and the geocachers fight back!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29wwln-medium-sidebar-t.html

and the geocachers fight back!


http://forums.groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=217896

Pretty misguided NY Times article (if u ask me)...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29wwln-medium-t.html

wow! talk about missing the point: of being outside with your family, enjoying nature, picking up trash, understanding that treasure can be in the details, and rejecting consumerist culture!

ECONOMIC CRISIS HITS THE GEOCACHE COMMUNITY

http://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/news/business/boltonbusiness/4224122.Weak_pound_stops_John_coining_it_in/

Stone Barns and Cache's

Truly BEAUTIFUL Saturday and off to Stone Barns for the first time. Wow, what a place! Free to roam the property that abuts the Rockefeller Preserve we were struck by the casual nature of the place and the wonderful farming practices on view. Free range, solar, renewable, organic, sustainable. All right out in the open for close inspection and the delight of the kids. The massive pigs randomly placed throughout the woods were a huge treat.

It was all smooth sailing till we got to the "Cafe" situated in a beautiful courtyard that looked like an Italian hilltop town center. We met some friends there and waited on the line for almost an hour. The register was interminably slow and it was as if the cashier was programing the Space Shuttle coordinates when he took our money.

We bought cookies, brownies, muffins, amazing salads of curried turnips, beets, egg and greens as well as tuna sandwiches and baloney presumably from the pigs on the farm. We had coffee, sparkling juices and ate and drank as the kids ran around the yard making snowballs from the last remaining grey piles scattered around the courtyard.

I was determined to hit a cache on this sweet day so I convinced the gang to follow me to a spot that sounded like an easy one on a lake on the outskirts of Tarrytown. We took a left from the north at Main Street and headed up the hill past some nice Victorians and toward a parking lot.

The GPS pointed us down the road but we opted to follow the path in the opposite direction around the lake toward what was described as "New York's version of the Everglades". Well, not quite. More like NY's version of a dump if you ask me. There was trash everywhere and we employed out CITO (Cache In Trash Out) techniques of grabbing a cardboard Bud Light box and filling it with cans and paper from the woods on either side of the path. The 12 cans from the box were literally on the ground near the empty container having been tossed within inches of where they were consumed, some having been thrown in a briar patch so that it was impossible to retrieve them without shredding ones skin on thorns.

We were most amazed by the sight of plastic bags filled with excrement. It seemed a common practice to pickup ones dogs poo and place it in a plastic bag, tie the top, and leave the bag on the path. I refused to pick any of these up and told the kids to steer clear of them. It is thought that plastic bags take up to 500 years to decompose. If that poo was out of the bag it would be gone in days. We all joked about the post Indian Point meltdown, the only thing left in Southern Westchester being petrified dog shit.

Back to the cache task at hand we continued toward the marker and as we approached the stone wall mentioned in the directions a small mongrel jumped up and began barking at us. It was a cute little mix of what looked like a boxer and a chihuahua. He actually looked like that half human half dog in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake and I expected Donald Sutherland to walk out from behind the wall with his mouth open. We never did see the dogs owner but the beast backed down and allowed us to walk around to the other side to look for the cache whose hint was un-encrypted as "near a tree at the base of the wall". Love it when it's clear and descriptive like that.

It was an easy one and we let the kids find it and did the usual signing the log and giving and taking. TFTC! Welcome Kiki, DD, Nickster and Tony P!

Snowy Monday

The March Lion came in the valley last night with loads of the white stuff and a snowday for the kids up here and the first one in NYC in 5 years. Bloomberg blew it by closing the schools last minute pissing off loads of working parents who couldn't find anyone to watch the kids before work. I'm surprised the phone lines didn't fail with all the calls to 1-800 watch my kid this morning. Bloomie said "all you had to do was look out the window to know there was no school". That's pretty nearsighted given the fact that it's been five years if u ask me.

We did a cache hunt on Saturday up at Nana's place in Orange County. Only three recruits participated including me on the blustery day and I put in the wrong coordinates to start and we ended up on some persons private property, having parked on the side of a busy road and a wild goose chase followed to say the least. My wife wisely chose to stay in the car while me and The Noodle foolishly trespassed realizing half way in we were totally off track.

We got back in the warm car and it was then I noticed the wrong coordinates (I really thought I had entered the right ones but this was not the first time) so we decided to continue on to the correct spot.

They took us to a typical residential area complete with ranch houses, McMansions and Muggles eyeing our car as we pulled into a small cul de sac on the banks of a river. We got out of the car and looked around seeing some kids on bikes riding back and forth over a beautiful train trestle that spanned the river. My wife said "hoodlums" under her breath as we walked on what felt like someone else's property and headed toward the arrow on our GPS.

We searched the entire trestle on our side. Every nook and cranny. Every possible hiding place. We kicked leaves revealing little blue dime bags (empty) and chunks of crumbling concrete from the bridge. We saw possible hiding places that would have been ideal had there been something there.

We were on the verge of giving up when i decided to go on the top of the trestle where the bikers had been. It was then that the vertigo I knew I had but rarely had the chance to test came rearing it's ugly head. I began to walk on the old rotting wood rail ties with gaping holes to the river below. I knew my 200+ pounds couldn't fall between them but I was still petrified. The person who hid the cache said the terrain was a 2 but "should be a 4.5". Yes, if your a total chicken.

I yelled to my son "don't come anywhere near me!" and crawled like a baby back to the path that led to the trestle. I looked at my wife and my look said we (I) had failed this hunt.

"Why do they make it so hard?" she asked me.

I wish I knew. Maybe I should have asked the hoodlums to help out.