Geocaching - It doesn't get much better than this.

Yesterday started at about 0830 meeting two friends, Mike (TheBaers) and Dave (Cobbler Guy) at the DeKalb oasis on rt.88 to plan a day of Geocaching. (See link for explanation.) The rules we set up were simple. If weather turned bad, we were done. There was no rush to do anything and the biggest one, enjoy.

The destination was Sterling Illinois, about 50 miles west of DeKalb. We had done some research and knew it was a fairly target rich area. After a Mc-something and a diet coke, we were off. Mike took the back seat with the computer for navigation. There was a preset start point, but having not really run navigation since he and I did the 100 cache run on the BoB series over 2 years ago, he decidedto familiarize himself with the set-up going out.

Three immediate locations presented themselves right as we got of the highway. These hides were almost as quickly found and, foolish optimist me decide to announce we would probably complete 40 to 50 today.

The first obstacle we ran into was a flooded park. One of the caches seemed inaccessible, however three more presented themselves so not a total loss. None of us expected to clear the area anyway. The first however was an old fire engine with so many nooks and crannies that all of us voiced the possibility of a dnf loomed. Mike however was the first to crawl under. First because "crawl" was an operative word for the day.

Our only other real "obstacle" came when we pulled up to a public park that contained three baseball fields. The cache was obviously in a large douglas fir, so we began combing it. A lady across the street, whom for the rest of the day we refered to in conversation as Mrs. Kravitz, decided that we were not going to be ther ewithout an explanation. She yelled several times when I finally tried to yell back an explanation to no avail. We decided, after she started to call for backup in the form of neighbors, that we might want to move along.


While Sterling seems more of an industrial base, there are still some spectacular sights. We finished around 1845 and headed back toward home, stopping in Rochelle to grab something to eat and then back to our respective homes with 33 new ones for me and about 35 or so new ones for the others. All in all, I call this a successful day and am anxious for the next outing.