Thursday, September 22, 2005

A geocaching experience

Over the weekend, my wife and I did some volkswalking and geocaching. Our first walk was at Zena, a small (and I do mean small) place (I won’t call it a town) a few miles southeast of Grove, Oklahoma. I had checked earlier to see if there were any caches in the area. The Lone Wolf cache appeared to be within a mile of the volkswalk start point. With the coordinates loaded in my GPSr, I activated the “go to” function. We followed the direction indicated by the GPSr. As we drove toward the cache, the distance indicator continued to decline. Finally the cache showed to be about 500 feet off to the right in some woods. As we kept moving slowly in the car, the number grew larger.

I stopped and turned around and went back to the point where the cache showed to be 500 feet away. On one side of the road were woods. On the other side in a wooded area there was a storage building, and behind this building there was a modular house or maybe a mobile home (trailer). I pulled off the road and parked my car in front of the storage building. My wife decided to remain in the car while I went looking for the cache.

I struck out through the woods in the direction of the cache, stopping periodically in clearings because the overhead vegetation from the trees was causing my GPSr to receive bounced signals. As I got close to the cache I could see that the land beyond the cache had been cleared.
Then I recognized the land as a cemetery. The spot where the cache was hidden was easy to recognize due to all the tree limbs which had been (unnaturally) placed over the cache (an ammo can).

I signed the log and was putting everything back in place when my cell phone rang. It was my wife, and she said some guy was pointing a gun at her, demanding that she get the car off his property. I returned to the car via the road to the cemetery (which I would have taken in the first place had I known it was there). My wife had managed to settle down the property owner without getting shot. From there we drove to the volkswalk start point and began our walk, which thankfully did not go past the scene of the gun incident.

We later wondered at the reaction of the property owner. Could he have been protecting his meth lab?

2 comments:

John E. Cother said...

Okay DJN, quit leaving the little woman alone:)

Unknown said...

Yikes !! Geocaching can get exciting here in Oklahoma sometimes, but I've never encountered that, thank goodness. Great blog, by the way !

GPSOkie
http://gpsokie.blogspot.com/