A FTF and a 4X Saturday

A sucky picture of city lights near GZ.  The moon is to the left.

A couple of new caches popped up on a Friday night, and with some free time on my hands, I decided to go after one of them. Since I reveal the cache container in this post, I will not provide a link to the cache.  It's better if you experience it yourself.  The cache was in a well known part of Mission Trails Regional Park, so I knew right away where I had to park and that the hike to the hide site would be safe to do at night.  I love hiking MTRP at night.  It's a little bit scary because it is very dark and there are TONS of coyote and who knows what else out there.  This one was less than a half mile from the trail head and even with a dying flashlight, I was able to make it to GZ without incident.  However, GZ was not exactly what I expected.  No bush, no boulder formation, no sign, no obvious hide site.  I tried re-zeroing but it was leading me to places I knew were no good for cache hides.  This hide was from an experienced geocacher, surely he would not just throw a container in a patch of weeds and call it a cache site.  The cache type was not chosen, so I wondered if it was a fake rock or some other type of trickery.  With limited light, it was hard to distinguish real from fake.  Maybe the coordinates were off.  Way off.  It had happened before on FTF hunts.  A GZ off by 30' is a LOT of ground to search at night.  And I didn't have all night.

Very, very sneaky...

Yes, there was an element of panic now.  I had come all the way out here, I was not about to leave empty handed.  Deep breaths, deep breaths. Was there any other information in the description that might help.  Anything at all.  Wait... what was that?  Ahhh.... bingo!  That was the feeling that I craved on these FTF hunts.  One of the better cache containers I have seen in awhile, and hidden in such a natural state. Very satisfying.  I love these kinds of hides!!

Mission Bay: Enchanted Isle in the foreground and
Sea World in the distance (the sky tower)

Saturday was a day for Munzee.  With normal 'green' munzees worth 4X the normal points (20 points for a cap or deploy), it was time to crank up the score.  Thankfully, Jayterho had recently deployed a bunch of new munzees along the bayfront in Mission Bay, so I had a great place to go cap green munzees.  I capped about 10 or so in the morning, during a walk with my wife and geopets, but we had to leave because of another obligation.  So I came back in the afternoon to finish them off.  Capped a few nearby Motel munzees and was able to get a room in both, which means I get residual points when other people cap them even though I didn't deploy the munzee. I followed the sidewalk from Tecolote Shores park, past the Hilton, and ended near Mission Bay park.  As I was finishing, I ran into ThunderousVoice, one of the local legends in both geocaching and munzee.  He's been laid up for a few weeks, but hobbled out for the same series I was doing.  We chatted for a bit and when I reached the end of Jayterho's trail, I was at the parking lot where ThunderousVoice had parked, so I deployed three new ones for him to cap after he got back to the car.  He was first to cap on all three! I ended up scoring over 600 points and moved up to Level 57.  Our clan earned the first weapon and made good progress towards the Mace (most of us are over 500 points now).  If you remember my last Clan post (here), I did pretty well with strategy #1 and #2.  More importantly, I got to spend several hours in a beautiful part of San Diego!