Outlaws!

Last night seanatron and I had our first legit run in with the cops. We had come close before, but this time it was for real. And all I have to say is...trying to explain to an old sergeant (that would probably rather type up his police reports with a typewriter than a computer) what Geocaching is, makes it sound pretty ridiculous.

This was bound to happen sooner or later, considering wandering around a location for an unspecified amount of time to try and retrieve something without being noticed does look a bit questionable. I also want to make note of seanatron's point to wear his battered black hoodie, beanie, and recalling his cat-like reflexes to duck behind objects whenever anyone passes by. I really should partake in this more often, I'm a little ashamed of my indifference when it comes to being seen while caching. Anyways...

We were going for our usual post-dinner 5 caches, and managed to wander up north into the southern tip of Newark. First off, Newark isn't exactly known for being the squeakiest city in the bay area. Seanatron and I have a fond memory with one particular Geocache we have appropriately deemed the "Hooker Cache." Our logs explain it all.

(It actually appears as though this cache was disabled because of the "derogatory logs." No surprise here.)

The cache we were stopped at last night (GC2M1YR - Black), was tucked in the back corner of a parking lot belonging to a new(ish) shopping center. We were there for no more than 15 minutes until the coppers showed up.

It's a good thing the backup cop was closer to our age, because the seasoned sergeant wasn't buying any word of what we were saying. We even showed him the iPhone app, but the blank look in his eyes told us our efforts were pointless.

The younger gestapo assured his superior that this looked legit, and there was no harm being done here. Apparently the location of this cache is regularly burglarized, vandalized, and there are some hermits living close by under the freeway overpass. Just our kind of cache! They never told us to leave, but we did anyways for good measure.

I hope we get stopped by the authorities many more times in the future. Why? Well, not only does it make a good story, but I found some sort of geeky pleasure in explaining to the uniformed muggles that the reason why we're suspiciously hanging around this dark parking lot at 12:30am is because we are using multi-million dollar satellites to locate a random container just to pull out a piece of paper, sign our names on it, put it back as we discovered it, and then go online and say that we found it.

-kobidge