It’s a little over two months since the last update on our attempt to finally complete the geocaching* Days of the Year grid on February 6, 2013. Two attempts resulting in DNFs (Did Not Finds) Wednesday afternoon means the new earliest date we can complete this challenge is November 28, 2013. I really hoped that going public with our completion date goal would lead to success. And I could go on and on about all the reasons I didn’t try for another cache, but really – all of that really doesn’t matter now!
Despite the (minimum) nine month deferral of the earliest possible date for completing this challenge, my overall assessment is that it’s worth attempting. As late summer changed quickly to fall and now early winter, I’ve captured some great images while out geocaching and have also found several quality urban caches over the past couple of months…
After FAILing to find a geocache on Wednesday, for about a half-a-day I considered temporarily abandoning geocaching again. But after living with my disappointment for a few hours, acquiring some much needed perspective, I decided to continue trying to fill in all the blanks in our “Days of the Year” grid between now and Feb 6/13.
Yesterday’s find brought a smile to my face, entirely due to the creativity the cache hider put into the container. Quality hides like that one are what keep me playing the game. Well that and getting outside to enjoy nature and practice photography. Anyhow, I will “keep calm and cache on” and hope that when Feb 7/13 rolls around there will be only one blank remaining!
* For those not familiar with geocaching, it’s basically a GPS-based treasure hunting game. Someone hides a container, shares its location on the geocaching.com website, and then other geocachers go out and try to find the container. As proof of visit they sign the logbook inside the container and then log their find online. Beyond this basic game of hide and seek, there are all kinds of challenges, puzzles and other variations that add interest to the game. One of the challenges is to find at least one geocache on each day of the year.