Find My Secret Geocache

"Find My Secret" is my latest geocaching hide. You may remember my camouflaged ammo can. Well, The Boy and I want and hid it yesterday. After our geocaching adventure, we climbed a local hill and found the perfect spot. The camo did a nice job of blending the can into the surroundings.

There were a couple of old exercise bikes on the top of the hill. I have no idea how or why someone would drag these up here but they were way too big for me to CITO. The wild flowers were beautiful and there were a few nice sized cactus bushes up there.

"Find My Secret" is not a normal cache. It's a mystery cache. The idea is that there is a travel bug of mine floating around out there called "My Secret". The travel bug is a container that has the actual coordinates of the cache inside. The rules are that once you get the coordinates out of the bug, you have to move it to a new cache. That makes it a little bit of a challenge to track it down.

I put one of those electronic 20 questions in there as the FTF prize. Have you seen those things? You think of something, the toy asks you questions that you answer yes or no. Then it guesses what you were thinking of. It is very fun to play with. I find myself going how did it know that with those odd questions it asks?

The cache was published late last night. Our local reviewer works very quickly to get caches published and seems to always do it at night. I held onto the travel bug until the cache was published. I didn't want someone stumbling on it early. Today, I started receiving notes from local cachers looking forward to its release.

I had my hiking boots and GPSr in the car and had a cache in mind to make the drop. When I got near it, I changed into the boots and headed into a small wooded area. I quickly discovered that I needed to approach from a different angle. When I got back on the road, I noticed that there was a large group of people eating lunch in a field about 50 feet from ground zero. They were probably wondering what this guy in a dress shirt, Dockers and hiking boots was doing tromping around in the trees. I couldn't leave the bug there so I headed off to another cache that I thought might be large enough to hold the container. I found the cache, added a smiley to my list of finds and dropped off the bug.

When I got home to log the bug drop, I found that the cache I put the bug in was a Snake & Rooster cache. Snake was one of the ones that had sent me a note saying they were looking forward to the bug drop. I guess they get a bit of an advantage but that cache has been around since September 2005.

This should be a fun cache to watch. hopefully as the summer geocaching picks up, the bug will really start moving. I wish I could say that the idea for the cache was all mine. Tonka_Boy actually told me about a cache like this in the Minneapolis area. Today, Snake told me that there was a similar cache in San Diego, but this is the first of its type in Temecula. So far the feedback is very positive.

Edit: 3/17/08 Congrats to Eric and Hill on the FTF on this cache! Enjoy the 20 questions game!

Pictures from placing the cache are below.