During the school year, Mrs. GeoK tries to get out walking with a particular friend once a week. It sounds good in theory, but the reality is that these scheduled walks are often cancelled, due to sick children, volunteer commitments, appointments, or bad weather. All of those things contributed to pushing the first such walk of 2012 all the way to January 31.
With the temperature slightly above freezing and a mostly sunny sky on Tuesday, Mrs. GeoK had hopes of finding a geocache. Her friend does not have an account on geocaching.com, but is usually willing to join in the search for any new cache hidden along their usual walking route. And there’s a cache we haven’t found about 300 meters past the usual turnaround spot, so conditions looked favourable for a smiley.
Unfortunately, there was a pretty strong wind blowing in from the west, across the frozen surface of Glenmore Reservoir. So cold ears prompted a turnaround at the usual spot, triggering a slight pang of disappointment. As they continued walking and talking, Mrs. GeoK spotted something unusual not far off the trail and she called a halt so they could investigate.
Imagine her surprise when she spotted a geocache sticker on the far end of the container! It turned out to be the physical location of a puzzle cache that we haven’t yet solved. Talk about serendipity! She signed the log, but hasn’t yet logged the find online, as she wants to try to solve the puzzle before claiming the smiley!
Mrs. GeoK also carried her camera. Here are a few of the better ones…
Since the puzzle cache wasn’t loaded into her GPSr, Mrs. GeoK also snapped a quick pic of the inside front cover of the logbook, which shows the GC code. The cache hider follows best practice: the cache note includes the GC code and contact information. Way to go! 
After a 6.7 km walk with her friend, Mrs. GeoK stopped off to maintain one of our hides. She successfully replaced the full log, but discovered she also has to do some physical maintenance on the hide, so that’ll happen next week and then we’ll enable the cache. To wrap things up, she went on another short walk to look for another cache. After a brief hunt she found it, but hadn’t read the description beforehand so wasn’t equipped with a writing utensil to sign the logsheet from the micro. She “made do” by scratching “GeoKs” into the paper with a twig and took a photo of the log for additional “proof of find”. The cache hiding spot provided a great view of the reservoir, and the last landscape posted with this entry was taken from that perspective. Thanks to Sleepy_hollow for the well-placed GC2Y6T9 HP Sail Boat Launch cache.
What about you? Have you found an unpublished cache or a puzzle cache simply by chance? Share your serendipity story with a comment.