One Square Mile

At least I didn't title it Geocaching trip 6.

While looking for some fun caches to find, Angie and I found one titled "One Square Mile." It sounded interesting for a puzzle cache. Some of those puzzle caches are just too hard but how hard could it be to walk one square mile. We started out planning for the "adventure." For this cache you had to go to 4 different coordinates each 1 mile apart and find a number that would be used to obtain the coordinates for the actual cache. Other than walking what we thought would be 4 miles it didn't seem too hard.

Angie plugged in the coordinates to see how long it suggested it would take us to walk the square mile. That's when we got a little worried. According to the internet it would be over 5 miles to travel the 4 coordinates. That was probably the first thing to weaken our determination.

How can one square mile equal over 5 miles? We later decided that it was trying to make the route in the order she entered the coordinates and not in the order necessary to make a square mile.

We were a little relieved but started to realize just how far 4 miles really is. I started getting I/M's from Angie while I was at work emphasising just how far 4 miles is. "It is only 2.9 miles from my house to Troy's parent's house" etc. It wasn't very helpful, but I wasn't willing to give up on the idea.

After work I stopped to pick up Angie and we headed out for the first coordinates. Turns out the first coordinates were not far from the Frontrunner station in Farmington. We parked the car in an abandoned parking lot and set out to find the first number. It actually didn't take us long to find it. We wrote it down and that's when we starting thinking about the 2nd coordinates and just how far 4 miles would be. It didn't take us too long to decide that maybe we should drive a little closer to the 2nd coordinates to find a better parking spot than the parking lot of an abandoned building.

As the GPS beeped that we were getting close to the 2nd coordinates we started to realize just how far 1 mile was. We parked the car on the side of the road in a housing area. We walked about 200 feet or so to the coordinates and then found the second number. We wrote it down and then looked in the direction of the 3rd coordinates. Do we start walking or move the car? If we left the car where it was we would have to walk to the 3rd & 4th coordinates and then all the way back to the car. Didn't take long for us to head back to the car. Of course we were starting to laugh at the direction our thoughts were taking us.

By the time we reached the 3rd coordinates we had realized that by turning down the road we could see the number without even getting out of the car. Now we are laughing so hard we are glad no one else had come with us. We had gone from the idea of walking 4 miles to not getting out of the car. Oh well. We did have to actually get out of the car for the final number and even walk through a few bushes.

For the final cache it said we could park at the horse arena of the fairgrounds and follow the paved path. The area was total empty so, in following with the way we were thinking we drove quite a ways down the side of the path before we actually parked and got out of the car.

The cache was not the easiest to find. We had to tromp through bushes and trees and I even got attacked by barbed wire at one point. We did finally find the cache and signed the log. All in all it was quite an adventure.

Since the "one square mile" didn't take as long as we anticipated we decided to collect a few more caches in the Farmington area before we returned home.

According to our list there was one in the Frontrunner parking lot. We were right next to a sign that showed an arrow to the Frontrunner parking lot. The problem was that the arrow pointed to a construction site with just dirt roads. The dirt roads did seem to lead toward the parking lot. We sat for a minute trying to decide if we were really suppose to drive on the dirt road. We gave up and decided to attempt it from the other side before actually trying the dirt road.
We did find a paved entrance to the parking lot and easily found the cache. On our way out we noticed that the dirt road would not have gotten us to the parking lot. We would have run into a construction fence. Guess one thing went in our favor tonight.

Next we tried one titled "A nice little walk" It wasn't too hard to find the cache, however it was a bit painful to retrieve it. It was in a fir tree and had fallen to the ground so we had to crawl under the tree to reach it. I got poked a few times which sucked. Once we signed the log we had to replace the cache. That is were the problems began. We put the cache back where we thought it should go. As we checked the area we decided that we had changed the difficulty of the cache from a 1 1/2 to a (-1). You could easily see the cache if you walked down the sidewalk, even though you couldn't from where we stood on the sidewalk. It took a few more attempts and a little while for us to control the giggles, but we did replace the cache and moved on.

We were able to collect 2 more by Farmington Pond with no problems at all before we called it a night. I haven't been to this pond for several years. I used to come fishing with my grandpa at this pond. It has changed alot. It's a nice little area. My grandpa would have loved it. We were watching some kids swinging out on a rope and landing in the pond. I couldn't believe they were doing that. It wasn't warm and we were wearing jackets. Oh well, you couldn't have got me to do it.

We managed to get a total of 5 caches for the night. Not too bad considering one involved a "4 mile" walk.