Geocaching with "thepaytons"

One of our geocoins took a 2,400 mile trip recently, from Georgia to Oregon. "Georgia (Appalachian Trail) On My Mind" was brought to a geocaching event in a town called Rogue River, and from there has been roaming around that state a bit. It’s trying to go to the country of Georgia, so hopefully someone can get it off this continent sometime in the future.

The other coin, "Just Shoot Me", which wants to get pictures of it taken and uploaded to the site, has apparently gone missing. It’s last known location was a cache near Montreal, Quebec, but that was 7 months ago, and, while other cachers have found that cache, no one has recorded picking up the coin (nor the one that I had also brought up to Canada on a business trip; both coins got moved and both have stopped). I’ve registered this geocoin with the site "tb-rescue.com" which allows people to register apparently lost (or non-moving) travel bugs. Others choose an area in which to get alerts for when a travel bug needs to be moved. We did get one group who said that, last March, they were going to try to locate the cache and rescue the coin, but no word since then. Ah well, all part of the game. These things get lost.

I was going to Montreal on business so I just had to get our first find outside the US. With this in mind, I had pulled out a geocoin that was in our cache as well as prepare one of ours to set on its way. I pulled up the map on geocaching.com and found that the nearest cache to the client’s preferred hotel that could hold a geocoin was a short drive away on a college campus. Sounded good

Except that when I went to book the room, they were filled up for 2 of the nights I was going to be there. The backup plan was to stay at a hotel where other folks from my company were staying doing work for another client. I booked the room first and then looked for coin-friendly cache.

Right across the street. Amazing.

Today I came back to the hotel and started looking.  Seems that whenever I go caching while on business, I wind up in an area that has lots of trash.  The location of the cache I found in Cleveland was near a dumpster, and trash was all around.  In this case, the trash was in what the cache hider referred to as a beaver den.  (Well, "la hutte du castor".  This is Montreal.)  And indeed once you approached it and walked into the bush, it did remind one of a beaver den.

But for the trash, this would be a fantastic fort for kids. 

I did some looking around, poking a stick at the stuff on the ground.  I got tired of picking through trash, so I thought I’d come back the next day.  However, it started to rain a little, and this huge bush was actually good shelter from the rain.  I decided to keep hunting until it let up.  Good thing I did.  Within 60 seconds, I found the cache.

As is my habit, I forgot to bring a pen, so I couldn’t sign the log this time, but I’ll come back tomorrow to fix that. 

Not much in the cache; a golf ball and a pencil eraser.  But I dropped off the two travel bugs I came with;  RedIrishLilly’s First Geocoin and Just Shoot Me.

Have a good trip!