CITO & A Trip Down Memory Lane

It's not all trash!

As my slaves have had another obligation for over a month, we couldn’t make forthferalz’s Righteous Event Cache on Sunday morning.   So to keep in the spirit of things, we decided to CITO some caches that are owned by non-Hobartian geocaching pioneers and take a walk down geoMemory geoLane while we were at it.

Road through the original cache siteWe started off at Polar Bear Swim.  This was the 3rd cache that I found on 9 April 2004, my first real day of caching.   We walked out to the cache via the track that originates near the caravan park.   A pause and moment of silence occurred at the original cache site (because really I couldn’t say much that hadn’t been said before ‘oh look, there’s the stump that was moved and hasn’t moved since!’).   Then we CITOed our way to the current cache location.   The area is certainly going up market.   Strangely enough the only trash at the actual cache location were a few Styrofoam peanuts.   The cache was checked, new Ziploc bags installed, a few dead swaps extracted, and we CITOed our way back to the van with an unfortunately overflowing bag.

Brief stop for my only find of the day, Mareniko’s Menagerie, (we cannot spend all our time in the service of others!) where we upset Brekel’s mother-in-law (you really should warn her about your dodgy friends!).

Scott near KY Aeroplane with Alum Cliffs in the backgroundAs it was the hottest part of the day, my miserable slaves decided I should be paraded out in my black fur on the longest walk of the day with no trees to shelter in and no sweet, cooling wind.   Luckily, I do love this walk.   We started out for KY Aeroplane noticing there were more houses here than last time we visited, however no where near as many as we had feared.   The walk seemed much shorter than last time, so we were at the cache location in no time, having found only a little bit of rubbish along the way.   When we arrived, I wanted to do nothing but swim, so swim I did.  We don’t have coordinates in the GPSr or PDA for caches we’ve already found, so the male slave ventured in one area and the female slave searched in another.  I, of course, knew exactly where it was, however I wanted more time for swimming so kept my mouth closed.   A sailboat approached, and just as I was thinking I was about to welcome el golco (and her imaginary boyfriend) ashore, it veered away.   Finally the female slave gave up and contacted Quilter and Mrs CP for help but actually found it just as the coordinates were coming through from CP HQ.

The cache was fine – dry as a bone, still plenty of decent swaps – but some of the logs mentioned that it had been swimming in water at times.   Hmm – there were some significant cracks in the lid, and the container, despite being a clip top, had a handle in the lid that lets water in.   As we’d remembered this as being a fairly sturdy clip-loc, my slaves stupidly hadn’t brought a replacement, so they had to resort to doing some fairly dodgy sutures with gaffer tape.   Ugh.

There was TONNES  of rubbish to be CITOed from this site – plenty of drink bottles that looked as though they had escaped from the fisher-muggles’ boats.   We filled several bags, then hit the track back.

Next up was a slight detour from the theme (but only slight):   a replacement cache at We’ve Stumped Annie.   The area isn’t worthy of canines, so my female slaved zipped in and out quickly.  But I’m grumpy with her for doing this;  we don’t want to encourage the ‘gizers not to visit!

The penultimate visit of the day was to the second cache we did all those year (and a bit) ago –  Wellington’s Cascade.   No trouble here needing coordinates;  like Polar Bear Swim, I’ve had a hand in keeping this one alive (my, what an attractive cache container that is!) so have visited several times.   The cache is in excellent nick – didn’t even need new cliploc bags – and the area looks much better for not having been visited so frequently (there was a time when there were lots of visits, and each cacher would add to the camouflage, and it looked a bit like a pre made campfire!).

Then finally, my first real cache  Hobart City Scratchie Exchange.   I feel a bit guilty about this one.   I replaced the log book a while ago, however as two log books wouldn’t fit into the container I have one at home.   I had intended to swap the container with one that would fit both and even had a suitable one worked out – then the environment was changed a bit and made my new container inappropriate.   Since then I haven’t checked on this one, assuming it would have to make due with having a new log book and the old one being at home in the Tasmanian Geocaching History Museum (along with the old containers for Point at the Little Swans, Wellington’s Cascade, and WPA1 & 2).   However, I hadn’t expected what I found – the old cache container was missing entirely, and the outer ‘camouflage’ part of the cache is now the only container.   I checked out the sizes of various containers I had available in the cacheMobile’s stock and none were quite right, so I’ll have to come replace this one later in the week.   Not the best end to my day of CITO and maintenance!

2 comments for “CITO & A Trip Down Memory Lane

Comments are closed.