Caching with a goal

I stopped the car in my driveway, opened the door, looked down at the pavement and wondered if I could muster the strength up to lift my leg and get out of the car. I made my way to the front door, went inside, took off my shoes, then headed towards my bed where I didn’t move much from for the next hour or so. Although I was exhausted, tired, and sore from the day’s activities, I was happy to be home, and glad to have  had a great day caching.

Saturday morning me and Rev Slippery left Moncton and headed towards Fredericton for the big launch of their city’s geocaching challenge. 30 new caches had been released in cooperation with the city of Fredericton, and Saturday was the launch. If you did all 30 caches, you received a specially minted geocoin for the city of Fredericton. Our plan was to get them all and snag our coin.

We made it to the breakfast a little late but managed to get what we needed to start our day of caching. We teamed up with Zemartelo and LadyTagAlong and decided to get most of the downtown ones on foot. We went from cache to cache, signing logs and applying stickers to our caching passport. We ran into many other cachers that were working on the challenge as well. Once we completed the downtown ones, we set out for Kilarney Lake and worked our way back.

The downtown ones were pretty much park and grabs while many of the ones on the North end were more of a hike. One cache in particular was an offset cache which we found ourselves descending down this rather steep embankment. We got the find but the climb back up the hill was a bit rough. A few spots we went to were a bit harder to find a parking spot or know where to go in, but between the four of us, we did pretty good. Several of the puzzle caches had us wandering around the university campuses which was also quite interesting.

By the end of the day, we had snagged a total of 30 finds and had enough to claim the coin and other rewards at O’Dell Park. We didn’t get a chance to record the podcast there as we had hoped, but we still had a fantastic time.

It’s days like this where the idea of caching with a goal in mind truly helps motivate you to go beyond what you might normally do. We really wanted to get them all in one day because it might be awhile before we get back to Fredericton. Despite missing the bulk of the final event, knowing that we accomplished what we set out to do was very satisfying. My body may not agree with it right now, but it was worth it.

Words really do not do justice to thank coopsquared (Daryl Cooper), the city of Fredericton, and anyone else who was involved in this project. At first, I was a bit skeptical of the number of caches for this challenge, but I got to see so much of Fredericton that I didn’t know about, and had such a great time that day that I cannot imagine this tour having been organized better.

If you have the opportunity to go to Fredericton and do this tour, please do it. You will not regret it. If you plan to do it all in one day, be sure you start early and be prepared to some walking along some great trails. Once again, thanks to all involved, and I hope that this raises the bar on city based geocaching tours and challenges.

The list of caches for this challenge can be found here and more information about the tour can be found here.