Geocache Find #400!

On a cool Wednesday evening in October, I hopped on my Bionx bicycle and left the office. But instead of heading home, I went in the opposite direction. The goal: Geocache find #400! This find was special not just because of the milestone, but also because it was an "Event" cache. In this case, the event was a gathering of local central-Ontario geocachers for an evening of meet-and-greet fun.

The "Sneakers in Barrie " event cache was hosted by local full-time geocachers IsqubaAndNawty, and attended by over 50 geocachers from the area and as far away as Oshawa. Cachers in attendance had finds ranging from dozens to thousands, and Nawty did a good job of keeping everyone moving about so there was lots of mingling.

Also celebrating milestones at the event were Luc & Sweety (400 finds), Lisdowney (500 finds), and the unstoppable Juicepig (1,100 finds). While Juicepig found that many caches in just over a year, I am rather excited by the fact that I found over 200 caches this year. On New Year's Eve the entire family made the 200th find on Sanibel Island. That was 266 days after the 100th milestone which took 464 days. Find #300 would come in mid-June, only 167 days after #300. The next 100 finds happened in 131 days, so the find rate has been accelerating. However, now that I have to travel 50 km to get to unfound caches, things may ease off a bit in 2007.

After a great evening, I celebrated by heading out for find #401: Juicepig's PUNISHER - Black Widow Maker cache. I had a feeling this was a cache I would want to do with company, and I wasn't wrong on that. In the picture below, you see me lying in the ditch about to wriggle my way through a drainage pipe into the storm sewer system. Yep, definitely not something I would want to do alone in broad daylight on a residential street.

Upon arriving in the concrete vault, I looked upward with my bright helmet light and blinded an eyeball looking through one of the holes in the manhole cover.

Joining in the find with me were Tomtec and Swifteroo. Since Swifteroo had already found it, I can only guess he likes crawling around the storm sewers. This is further supported by the fact that he took the long way out, crawling all the way under the road to the other side.

While the three of us crowded into the concrete vault underground, the perpetrator of the whole thing -- Juicepig -- looked on. That's Juicepig below, blending in for night caching, and me doing just the opposite.