Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Richard the Mentor



We have two Carols at the gym. One we call Carol O2 because she's on portable oxygen. The other we call Carol Kingsley because she lives in.......Kingsley!

Carol Kingsley has shown an interest in geocaching, and asked us if we could introduce it to her. We loved that idea, and we set a date. Dick printed out a bunch of material for her, and planned a route filled with easy caches - each one a different type. After gym, we all went to the Omelette Shoppe, and then we hit the road.

Here's Dick's description:

April 27 by basswoodbend (2586 found)
The Curse of the Blood Diamond by gonfishin

One of the gals at the gym had noticed that I often wear one of my Geocaching tee shirts when working out. She asked us to show her what it was all about.

Her husband thinks that it would be too physically demanding for her. We picked a selection of local caches which demonstrate that the challenge can be more mental than physical.

We picked a couple of park and grabs in town, ("Campus Plaza" and "Welcome to Traverse City") and then stopped by "The end of the line". She was excited and enthralled.

To give her the experience that "If it weren't for Geocaching, I'd never known this was here" we next did "Aerial Photo". "Wow! what a view!"

We added a regular ammo can to the route with a short walk with "Hidden Toy Box". She found it without assistance. To cap off her experience we turned to the Geo Pirates and their unique Patrick Murphy and "Captain Kidd's Treasure". Her shriek when the Captain was exposed brought the Pirates on the run and we had a nice chat.

She is hooked we think. As a finale, she asked to search for one that we haven't found and thus we came back here. She actually spotted the cache first. We were surprised when we opened the log book and discovered that we were also first finders and so we explained the FTF Dance ritual. Luckily we were deep in the woods and so no one could observe three senior citizens waddling around a stump. We took none of the stash, just signed the log at 2 PM and left our sig items and some hand sanitizer. Thanks for an enjoyable finish to a great day.