I don't know what the heck I'm doing when I'm geocaching. Probably I should try tagging along with someone who knows what they're doing sometime. In general, I find myself on my knees in the mud looking under a rock for something that I can't find.
But when I was in NYC, I gave it a couple of whirls.
I like to walk in Manhattan. If you just walk around, you'll probably bump into interesting things. But choosing a route is tricky if you don't have a destination.
One afternoon, I pulled out my phone and brought up the Geocaching app. This app, among other things, will show you a list of registered geocaches near you, sorted by distance.
So I went to the closest Geocache that I hadn't already visited. Or rather, I went close to it. I failed to find the actual geocache. But I went to its coordinates and I looked around a little for the 'cache.
Then I did that again and again and again and... As I visited more sites, the "...that I hadn't already visited" rule became more important—otherwise, I suppose I would have "bounced" between two nearby sites. Instead, I wandered far afield (though, strangely, I looped back to where I started at one point). I failed to find a geocache on the girders under the High Line. I failed to find a geocache behind a fence painted with a kitty-cat. To phrase it that way makes it sound futile. But walking around New York isn't boring. I walked past a gaggle of tourists gone wild getting their picture taken with The Naked Cowboy. I crossed busy streets. I walked past shops. I failed to find a geocache in a tree. I failed to find a geocache in a planter.
It was a good day.
I didn't figure it out until it was winding down, but the folks behind NYC's DASH3 puzzlehunt (the whole reason I'd come to NYC) were puzzly geocachers. But I talked with this player "Child of Atom," asking him how he heard about DASH3. And he said that he knew Brett (the organizer) because they collaborated on making a collection of tricky puzzle geocaches and challenging folks to solve them.
" We collected some of the best geo-puzzles in New York into a bookmark list of Dastardly Puzzle Caches... There were just over 30 puzzles, so we decided that one tag would be earned for solving 15, and another tag for hitting 30. We picked out a pub and a date two weeks in the future. We generated a list of people who had solved at least a handful of them and sent out an email telling folks when and where we’d be, and that we’d be handing out tags to any qualified solvers."
This not only generated some interest—it also brought together folks with a similar interest at a pub, ready to chat and reinforce each others' strange habits.
Kind of amazing that I didn't know about that until I was about to leave. Anyhow.
On my last day in town, I tried out a couple of Child Of Atom's puzzly geocaches.
It Begins at the Inventor's Gate was the puzzly geocache I wanted to try more than any other. From my searches for DASH-themed sites in Central Park, I'd found out that there was a statue of Samuel Morse at the Park's "Inventor's Gate". Right, Morse—the namesake of my favorite puzzly code system. When Child Of Atom mentioned he'd written puzzles themed on Central Park's gates, my ears perked up. And so I brought a puzzle printout to the Inventor's Gate and sat and solved. But I only got a partial solve; though I soon had some lat-long coordinates to visit, I hadn't used all the data in the puzzle. And when I went to visit the real-world spot that corresponded to those coordinates, it was in the middle of a street intersection. I dodged traffic a little, peering at a manhole cover. Was there something tiny hiding in some nook of the manhole cover? I got tired of dodging traffic. Maybe I just didn't want this geocache enough.
It Begins At The Childrens Gate was the other one I tried, sitting with a printout and puzzling by the Delacorte Music Clock, one of the places I'd site-monitored the day before. This puzzle, I couldn't even get a first crack on. I had a couple of ideas. One of those ideas involved visiting the zoo by the Children's Gate. I emailed Child Of Atom, asking if that was a reasonable thing to do. He replied, and I knew that idea was on the wrong track. I had another idea that didn't pan out, but by golly now I've got a good idea the next time I want to make a puzzle that looks like this puzzle.
In the end, I didn't find any geocaches while in New York, but I had a good time anyhow.
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