Second To Post! (seanatron's introduction post)

I awoke this morning to find an e-mail informing me that kobidge had started a blog to capture the breadth of our caching adventures. Naturally I was excited, and wanted in on the sweet blogging action. This worked to my favor since she was open to suggestion of re-branding this as a "kobatron" page where we both write about our caching experiences, and it turns out we were on the same page anyway, so here we are.

Geocaching has evolved into one of my favorite hobbies over the past two years, currently just behind writing/playing music and sitting neck in neck with rock climbing (another fun adventure!). I fell in love with it because it combines stealth with the upper echelon of nerdom, and it has fostered an amazing community of strangers from all ages, places, and backgrounds. It's hard to compare the exhilaration one feels when finding a new cache, or the slight giddiness that erupts just below the surface when driving through familiar cache territory, knowing you're surrounded by dozens of "out in the open" scavenger hunt treasures for all.

I'll never forget my first geocache.

After hearing of the fun adventures kobidge had gone on when her boss introduced it to her and a few coworkers, I was immediately curious. One night we set out to find a few caches near my place, and settled on one about a mile away across from a big electronics store. It was somewhere around 10-11PM when we started, and I remember fumbling with the GPSr for a little while to try and find the exact location of the cache. I feel like we were there for about 10 minutes and contemplated giving up when nothing seemed apparent, but then we had a breakthrough.

There was a small camouflaged container with a magnet attached to it that held the cache in place on one of the big metallic towers that holds power lines. Once we made the find I was stunned, and the feeling of knowing that cache was sitting there, unbeknownst to most people, but still "hidden in plain sight" was immensely intriguing.

I was hooked.

From then on we went on a caching rampage for the next few months, finding a number of tricky nano caches, solving some clever puzzle caches, and going on some real adventures with a few caching expeditions during a trip to Hawaii.

Hawaii really opened up a new respect for geocaching, and I don't think I truly understood the potential of this fun and nerdy hobby until then. Prior to that trip, kobidge and I had become quite good at finding a number of suburban caches. We cached at night, and while it often added another level or two of difficulty, there was something about it that felt renegade. Neighborhood caching was a way to turn boring street corners and sidewalks into exciting miniature adventures, and we were way into it. It was a fun way to discover new areas in already familiar towns.

Hawaii, on the other hand, often had many larger caches that were easier to find/solve, but the views from the cache locations were simply breathtaking. It's impossible to adequately describe the feeling of looking out across an ocean of clouds from the top of Mauna Kea, feeling as if you've suddenly inhabited some alien ice planet where no other civilization is visible. Then, when night falls, you take a drive back down the mountain and find a piece of tupperware hidden under a pair of giant rocks, caching only by moonlight.

This hobby has ignited a level of excitement and vigor that I feel typically comes in infrequent short bursts through most normal, every day activities. It's something that has certainly brought kobidge and I closer together, and you'd be surprised how adventurous and daring you may be when all that is at stake is signing a piece of paper that is tucked away from the public eye (but not too far). I have spent countless nights wandering around parking lots and public parks, diving into bushes and braving the rain merely to log another handful of caches, and I know I haven't spent nearly enough time doing this.

It's definitely exciting that kobidge and I are reuniting our caching powers and combining our finely tuned geosenses to continue this caching rampage and have an avalanche of cache finds this year. Blogging about it seems like the natural progression of things since it has brought so much excitement and adventure to our lives, often without even leaving a 5-mile radius from where we live/work!

So thanks for tuning in, and hopefully we can continue sharing our fun adventures here. I'll close this first post with one of my favorite pictures of us caching:

From our pitch-black night walking along the hardened lava in Volcanoes National Park to log a virtual cache, navigating only by flashlights

- seanatron