Three Thousand Finds

I found my 3000th geocache today. Geocaching is where the name of this blog comes from; I started it around the time I found my 1000th geocache. Back then I was behind in logging and wasn’t keeping very careful track in the first place. I had taken over the account that we made for my daughter’s Girl Scout Troop, renamed it, and was catching up the caches I had found before I had my own account. So I didn’t know exactly when it happened. I still like the idea of geocaching as metaphor, of looking for something according to the instructions and then finding something else, maybe something more. 

The coin I gave my husband in 2012 for his 3000th find

Geocaching became a way to discover my new home after moving to California. My “Mundane Monday” and “Thursday Doors” posts are both full of pictures I took while out caching: Newt. Rock Wall. Pinecones. Branches. Broken Path. Bicycle. Milpitas. I posted the pictures for UULent, and I played around with them on the Prisma app.

Where the Silly Creature Lurks

And then, two years ago, my husband and I started a daily geocaching streak. I am now on day 744 of that streak, and it has been made easier by all the fun lunch events that local geocachers keep hosting. That streak is the biggest reason it took me much less time to get to 3000 finds from 1000 than it did to get from 0 to 1000. Unlike many geocachers, I’m not that big on statistics, goals, and achievements, save this one.

Today’s find was called “Where the Silly Creature Lurks,” and it was lurking in a walkway between two suburban streets in Sunnyvale. There are a lot of these walkways here on the peninsula, and usually I have no idea that they exist prior to my finding a geocache there. The fences and walls on either side provide ample nooks and crannies in which to stash a cache. In this case, when I finally found the pouch containing the cache, the “silly creature” in question was the one I saw in the mirror!