Sunday, March 1, 2009

It's All About the Numbers! NOT!

On Wednesday of last week we went to Bellingham. The weather promised to be rainy but it actually was not too bad until the middle of the afternoon.

We had never really done any caching in Bellingham so it was new to us all. We spent a good deal of time in the Bellis Fair area and a little to the south of it. There were enough caches there to keep us busy. It being a shopping area with mall upon mall we ran into a goodly number of lamppost caches which count for as much as any other cache but which become a little boring and predictable after a while.

By now Erica had her official log book stamp: PelikanKru with a neat little pelican on it, courtesy of Fastamps (design courtesy of Mom!). Both girls had become total experts at all the administrative aspects of caching, operating both the GPS and the Palm as if they were born to it. And both proved to have developed finely honed geosenses so that I was pretty well reduced to driving from cache to cache. Only when they ran stuck did I have to come to the rescue which I did a couple of times quite impressively, even if I say so myself!


The hand that you see pictured in one of yesterday's posts was in a cache called Farm Hand. It was probably a left-over from the 'weird' types of caches the two organizers of last year's Lynden Hallowe'en event had bought and found no place to use it. On this day we found another: Don't Bite the Hand etc.... Maybe the next time we'll find one that is called: Don't Feed the Hand that Bites You...


Around mid-afternoon mom called to acquaint us with the happy tiding that it was snowing in Abbotsford and that it was sticking and might we be thinking of coming home before it got too bad. We decided that we might indeed.


On our way back to the north country Erica picked up a few more caches that we (goinggone) had already found earlier. They helped her to beat her previous personal number of caches in one day, set the previous day. Her new record is now 20! Some people are just naturally good at this thing called caching!



Talking about numbers, also on this day she got her 50th cache! Not an impressive number perhaps, but you have to reach this number before you can go on to bigger things. So it is an event worthy of being noted; so here it is: duly noted that PelikanKru found a total of 50 caches and counting! Congratulations PelikanKru! Now on to bigger things in Winnipeg where spring is around one of the corners, somewhere...

Let it be noted too that cachers love to remind themselves and each other that this 'sport' is not about the numbers but about the fun in its many varieties, many of which I have pointed out before in this series of blogs. The fact that you see behind each cacher's name the number of finds he/she/they have everytime you see one of their logs must be sheer coincidence! Because...it is not about the numbers! And therefore I should really resist the temptation to share with you all that on this day I reached 1400! But then, whenever a person says 'should' it is usually too late, as it is in this case.



Therefore, before I throw out any more numbers, I had better quit. Done. Easy.

O, we came home to a LOT of snow! Jeep weather!


1 comment:

Eddie said...

When we are on our best behaviour, it's not about the numbers.

When we are alone, marching down a trail through the gloom of night or incelement weather trying to get an FTF, you better believe it's ALL about the competition that are reflected in the numbers!
LOL