That day was not the most exciting one of my life. We hiked back to the garage where the van sat with two new tires. I wanted to kick them, but knew it wouldn’t do any good. We got directions to a coin laundry near a burger joint.
“Okay, there’s a method to this,” I said as we stood in front of the washing machines. “This one is for whites, this one is for colors and this one is for permanent press.”
“Why?”
“Because you have to wash them separately or bad things happen.”
“Ooooo. Like what?”
“Like you get wrinkles in your permanent press, color in your whites and bleach in your colors. All those are bad.”
“Gabby, I’ve never done that before. It doesn’t matter.”
“Okay, then, you do your laundry over there and I’ll do my laundry over here. I sort. You can have wrinkly colored laundry if you want to.”
He scratched his head but began sorting his clothes into the three washing machines.
“What about white permanent press? Does it go in the white one or the permanent press one?”
“Permanent press. Your shirts are old enough that the color won’t run much.”
We had to use a fourth machine because the one we were putting colors in got too full.
“Did you ever find the swag you pulled out of that cache?” Twiggy asked.
“Oh shoot! No!” I said and began unpacking the washer with colors in it. I had to search the pockets of three pairs of jeans before I finally found a pair with a little lump in the pocket. I stuck my hand in and pulled out… a lucky rabbit’s foot.
“Ugh! I’ve been walking around with a rabbit’s foot in my pocket. Gross!” I said.
“Yeah, but just think how bad yesterday might have been without it.”
“It sure isn’t a very lucky rabbit’s foot,” I said.
“It wasn’t even lucky for the rabbit.”
We fed the change machine, put our quarters in the washing machines and went to the burger place in search of breakfast. They didn’t have much on their breakfast menu, but at least it was cheap.
Half an hour later we switched the laundry to the dryers and then tried to get enough of a signal to look at the geocaching map.
“What caches do you have in your GPS?” I asked.
“Not very many for this area.”
“Even if it’s within a few miles we should be able to drive there, find the cache, and drive back before the clothes are dry.”
“Okay, let’s see.” He turned on his GPS and waited for it to boot up. “One. I only see one close enough.”
“Okay, so what is it?”
He clicked to the description.
“Well, it doesn’t look too interesting, but it’s still a smiley.”
We left the Laundromat and attempted to drive to the cache, but the area was full of dead end streets and we had to turn around time after time.
“This town is a maze,” I said.
“No kidding, but that’s half the fun. I kind of like seeing how people live in different towns. All the houses are small. The lots are large. The people grow fruit. They all have dogs and cats. Small town America.”
“It is kind of interesting,” I admitted. “I keep expecting to see a lemonade stand. But if I did see one I’d be tempted to ask the kids for a loan instead of buying a glass of lemonade.”
“Your finances are that tight?”
“I could hear the quarters crying for help as I pushed them into the washing machine. They wanted to pay for something more worthwhile than making a machine jiggle.”
Twiggy turned the van down yet another dead end street but this one had a little parking area at the end and beyond the parking area was a little park.
“I didn’t invite you along so I could break your bank,” he said. “You’ve done more than your share. So only pay for things you want.”
“I can’t do that. That would be like… like a date or something.”
“Define a date.”
We parked and eyed the park for muggles. It was a quiet day and we didn’t see any so we opened the door and slid out of the van.
“A date is when you arrange a time and an activity and then you go do it and the person who invites the other person pays for the activity.”
“Okay. So. Would you help me fold clothes and go out to lunch with me today?” he asked.
“You want to turn today into a date?” I replied.
“No, I want to turn the whole week into a date, but folding clothes and eating lunch comes first.”
I couldn’t deny it anymore. My best friend had other intentions. I should either accept his invitation and the role of girl friend or I should call my parents and figure out how to go home. To stay would just lead him on and I didn’t want to do that. Or did I? I was so confused.
“Can I be totally honest with you?” I asked.
“Yes, I hope you will be.”
“I don’t believe that, but since you stated it I can hope what I say won’t hurt you.”
His look made me think that what I was going to say just might hurt him, but I wasn’t sure what it was I was going to say, so I jumped off that proverbial cliff and ran in mid air for a few sentences.
“If I have sex before marriage I am going to be disowned. I am not going to have sex with you until I am ready for either marriage or disownment. If you’re willing to accept that stand, then we’re on the right track. But I am not ready for marriage. And neither are you. We both have huge financial considerations before we can decide anything and the middle of college isn’t the… what?”
“I know that.”
I quit running in midair and I wasn’t sure if I was falling or not.
“Gabby, you’re so afraid of the forbidden S word that you run away. Can’t you relax enough to just come along with me and see what the day brings?” He stopped and he turned to me. “All I want right now is an occasional… this.” He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me tight. “And maybe later, we can think about… this.” He put his fingers gently beneath my chin and tilted my head up. Then he kissed me. My second kiss. And it was like the first one. But I didn’t want it to be. “Relax. Just go with it.” Then he kissed me again. “That’s better. You’ll learn. Listen to your heart and your lips will reflect what’s in there.” He took my hand and led me into the park. “Now let’s find that cache. It should be easier than the others we looked for.”
The park was small, so it was only a short walk to where the cache was hidden. I began to worry about the clothes sitting in dryers that had run out of time. In the dorms it was a major infraction of the unstated rules to take up machines after the cycle had ended. There were so many people trying to use a few machines and there was a five minute rule. If you left and were not back five minutes after the cycle ended the next person had a right to take your clothes out, toss them in a cart and use your machine, no matter what the state of your clothes were. I learned very quickly to keep tabs on my machines. It wasn’t unusual to find three loads of damp laundry piled all together in the cart and then there was confusion about who owned what.
“You take the GPS,” Twiggy said. “I’ve got some ideas to check out and I don’t need the GPS for that.”
Since Twiggy had some ideas I took the time to read the hint and description. It was only a two/one cache. Anybody should be able to find this one. It was a small one, but we’d found small ones before.
“Tricky, I almost gave up on this one,” one of the logs read.
“How could I miss this? All I can say is it is good at sitting quietly in a bush,” said another.
“My five year old spotted it easily. His first real find!” said a third.
Reading the description and logs told me a lot. It had the easiest terrain rating, which meant it was wheelchair accessible, providing a wheelchair could go through park grass. A five year old child spotted it easily. So it was low, within reach of a wheelchair bound person or a child. Now I knew to ignore the canopy of the trees and anything directly on the ground.
We walked around a playground, the swings swaying gently, but empty in the breeze. Beyond the play ground was a copse of trees. The neighborhood surrounded the park and each house had a walled backyard. There were bushes separating the yards from the park. Twiggy headed for the trees and I headed for the bushes.
“Over there? Really?” Twiggy asked.
I read the distance off the screen of the GPS. “Twenty-three feet. But I think it’s down low because of the logs and the rating.”
“Hey! You’re learning! What did you read that makes you go to the bushes?”
“It’s only a one.”
“And what does that mean?”
I sighed. “I’m tired of pop quizzes. A one terrain means it can be reached and retrieved from a wheelchair. So that restricts the hide to somewhere between a foot and six feet off the ground. But it was retrieved by a little boy so that means it’s probably between one and five feet. Wow, that shaves a whole foot off the area.”
“Still, that’s good thinking. I’ll make a geocacher out of you yet.”
Searching bushes was not my favorite part of geocaching. I tried the visual approach first. I scanned the branches looking for anything that looked like it was out of place. I found a lot of trash. Sometimes Twiggy and I would pull out a plastic bag, fill it up with trash and throw it away later. I was told this was being a good geocacher citizen and was referred to as CITO. Cache In Trash Out. I especially liked to do that in little parks because it made a distinct difference right away and I felt good about helping the park be a fun place to go. I followed Twiggy until I could unzip and pull a bag out of the pack. I waved it in the wind to open it up and then began picking up candy wrappers, paper cups, chip bags, beer bottles, bottle caps, a pill bottle, a muddy pony tail holder… on and on I gathered trash keeping a sharp eye out for the cache. We looked and looked some more. Twiggy moved to the trees but I knew the cache wasn’t going to be up high.
“Our laundry is sitting in a dryer wrinkling to death and there’s an angry customer willing the machine to spit it out,” I said.
“I hate DNFs.”
“I know. We can come back after we fold the laundry.”
We walked dejectedly back to the van, the bag clunking as I walked. I dropped it behind the seat and climbed in. When we got back to the Laundromat I pulled out the bag and it hit the side of the van and clunked and rattled again. I tossed the bag into the trash can just inside the door of the Laundromat and it didn’t clunk, because the can was full of little soap boxes, lint, dryer sheets and holey socks. The dryers had stopped running but there were no irate customers waiting for us. I stuck more quarters in the permanent press dryer and let it tumble again while we folded the other loads.
“Why do we have to fold all these clothes?” Twiggy asked.
“Because it minimizes the wrinkles.”
“Who cares about a few wrinkles?”
“Me.”
I folded mine and his and stacked his so my favorite shirts and pants would be on the top. When all the laundry was folded we looked at the box situation. It was pretty sad. The boxes had dried out but they were no longer sturdy. I collapsed a box and stuffed it into the trash can and it hit the bag of trash I had dropped in there earlier. The sound was just a bit odd and that was when I remembered the medicine bottle.
“What are you doing?” Twiggy asked when he saw me burrowing in the trash.
“Checking something. I think…” I opened the trash bag and pulled out cups and wrappers until I found the bottle. “I think I threw away the cache!” I pulled out the bottle and shook it hopefully.
Twiggy looked around taking a muggle count, then he grinned.
“Open it!”
“We need to fold the permanent press.”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
“Oh, okay.” We took the cache to one of the folding tables and dumped it out. Inside was a washer, a nut, a little pop up toy, a domino, a small coin from Germany, and a little, decorative metal disk.
“Hey! A pathtag! You struck it rich! These are hard to find!”
“What is it?”
“It’s like a little geocoin. See the hole? That lets you put it on a key ring or necklace. Lots of people collect them. What’s the picture on it?”
It had a wave and a surfer and said CAgoofyfoot on it.
“Cool! It’s from a geocacher all the way from the west coast!”
I was puzzled by it. I’d never seen one before. I traded for it so I’d have it handy while I thought about what made these little metal tags so popular, yet hard to find. I signed the log and we set the cache aside so we could hide it again after the clothes were all packed away. As we folded I asked Twiggy about pathtags.
“What are they? And why are they hard to find if they are so popular?”
“They are kind of expensive and each geocacher designs and buys their own custom tags.”
“You mean this guy designed his own tag and had it made for him?”
“Yeah.”
“How much is expensive?”
“Well, you usually order them in batches of fifty to two hundred depending on how involved you are in the hobby. I haven’t priced them but I bet it’s over a hundred dollars.”
“Wow, no wonder they are hard to find. I want to keep this one, since it was my first.”
“Just don’t get any ideas of attending some school in California.”
“Okay. You know this contest is in jeopardy if we spend many days doing laundry and looking for two/one caches in parks.”
“Hey, it was a cute park.”
“It was. And we need to go back there. We don’t want to steal a cache.”
We loaded the permanent press into the van, I made sure I had the cache, and we drove back to the park. About half way to the park a police car pulled in behind us and followed us the rest of the way to the park.
“What’s up with the cop?” Twiggy asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe he is looking for a nice quiet place to fill in reports,” I suggested.
“That’s what doughnut shops are for,” he said. We opened our doors and slid out.
The police car pulled up behind the van and the officer leapt out of his squad car.
“Freeze right where you are,” the officer said.
“Uh, excuse me officer, we haven’t done anything wrong,” Twiggy began but he got a very official looking glare and the officer acted like he might draw his weapon if we did anything questionable.
“I have a report that you were heard talking about stealing some cash.”
“No,” I said. “We didn’t want to accidentally steal a cache. C-A-C-H-E. Cache. We were looking for a geocache and I was picking up trash and I accidentally CITOed the cache so we were…” I’d done it. I’d slipped into geospeak. And the officer was totally lost. Twiggy thought it was great, like a geocaching milestone or something. I began again. “When geocachers look for a cache, a container hidden specifically for them to find, they pick up trash and clean up the area, too. When I was picking up trash I thought the cache container was trash so I stuck it in my trash bag. You can go back to the Laundromat and see the rest of the trash. I can even itemize it for you if you want. And this,” I said producing the pill bottle, “is a geocache. We are just returning it to its rightful place.”
He didn’t like the fact that the cache was a pill bottle. He was used to finding pills in pill bottles and they were not always the pills on the label.
“What’s in it?” he asked.
“A log book. We always sign the log. Then there are little tradeable items. If I remember right this one now has a washer, a nut, a little pop up toy, a domino, a foreign coin, and a keychain in it.”
“Open it up.”
I opened the bottle and poured the contents out into my hand.
“This is the cache, and this is the cash,” Twiggy said as he plucked the coin from my hand. “Coins are left in caches a lot.”
“Where did you find it?” the officer asked.
“In the bushes at the back of the park. We’ll use our GPS to find the right spot and hide it better so only geocachers can find it.”
“Open up the van,” the officer requested. Actually he was being polite, if a bit too thorough. “I’ll need to see your license and registration.”
“The van is not ours. We swapped cars with a buddy so we could geocache for a few weeks.”
“Just open it up.”
Twiggy produced all the requested documents and the officer wasn’t pleased that all Twiggy’s information matched the registration.
“Did you know this registration expires next week?” the officer asked.
“No. Oh shoot. I’ll call and see if I can get the new sticker.”
Finally the officer said, “Sorry for detaining you. The person who called has been a trusted citizen of this town for more than fifty years.”
“It’s okay,” Twiggy said.
“Let’s see about this geo-cache,” he said.
Half way across the park the LOWBAT message flashed onto the screen of the GPS.
“I think we can get enough of a reading to find ground zero,” Twiggy said as we hurried to the back of the park.
I jogged ahead because I had a rough idea of where I had picked up the cache. I reached the spot and began looking around for hiding places.
“It has to be within reach, but out of sight,” I told the officer as the two men caught up with me.
“Ground zero’s over here, Gabby,” Twiggy said.
“But I found it over here.”
“We still have to replace it at the coordinates. That’s where the GPS is going to lead people so that’s where the cache belongs.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
We began looking around where the GPS pointed us.
“Just find a spot out of sight,” Twiggy told me. “we’ll post how we found it, about the trip to the Laundromat and how we replaced it. If the cache owner wants to make sure it’s in the right spot he’ll come look.”
“But I know it was supposed to be in a specific spot or it wouldn’t have this hole in the lid.”
“Good catch!” Twiggy said. “You’re beginning to think like a geocacher. Maybe there was a wire and it was hooked on a branch.”
“Oh! Oh! I know! Look for a wire or something silver!”
“Why?”
“Remember? There’s a nut and a washer in it! I bet it had a bolt or something through the hole and it worked loose over time!”
It took a lot of searching but we finally found an S hook with an eyebolt connected to it.
“Bingo!” Twiggy said. “Now all we have to do is tighten the bolt again and hang it back up.”
“Are there many of you geocachers out there?” the officer asked.
“No, not really,” Twiggy answered.
“Are they all looking for random bottles in parks?”
“No, there’s different kinds. This is just a little one.”
“Maybe I need to learn more about this hobby,” the officer said.
“That would be cool,” Twiggy told him.
“You kids have a good day and stay out of trouble,” he said, then left us to our geocaching.
“We will,” I called to his retreating back.
Twiggy slid the eyebolt through the hole in the lid and put the nut on. One of the tools he carried in his geocaching pack was a device that had several tools on it and he was able to use the pliers on it to hold the nut still while he tightened the eyebolt as much as possible.
“So, miss inspector, do you think it’s tight enough?”
I tried to loosen it but it held tight.
“You’re a cache repair man,” I said.
We hung the cache back up and he gave me a playful snack on the shoulder as we walked back to the van.
“We have to find another hard one or we’ll have no hope of winning,” I said.
“Okay, onward and cacheward!”