The Geocache flies at midnight

Today, I was in Santa Monica meeting some friends I've made over the Internet. One was flying in from Kansas City and the four of us (two others from Southern California plus myself) were planning on having lunch somewhere in downtown Santa Monica. This is becoming almost a ritual now as it is the third year in a row that the four of us have gotten together to enjoy each other's company in person as opposed to just on-line. Before our meet and greet, I went caching.

I got down to the Santa Monica Pier and found a virtual cache and a webcam cache. At that point it was getting late in the morning and I knew I would have to make my way over to where we were going to meet, but I wanted to find a real cache container. There was a cache just to the southeast of the pier called Lord of the Rings, so I checked that one out in my PDA. The beach front area here is very busy, so imagine my surprise when I saw that it was a regular sized cache.

As I walked over to the cache, I noticed that this area of the beach is the original Muscle Beach where Jack LaLaine and other body builders trained in the 1950s. There were all sorts of physical apparatuses there that people could use to build up their bodies. I wasn't dressed for this type of activity, so I went right for the cache. This was where it got interesting.

I'd looked at the cache page and wasn't quite sure what to expect after reading it, but once I got down there, I realized where this cache must be. Once I got near ground zero, I realized what I had to do, so I waited patiently in line for my turn. Once I got to the front of the line, I said the code words to the man behind the counter and I had the cache in hand, a nicely sized rubbermaid type of container. I took the cache over to a nearby bench and looked through it, perusing all of the travel bugs and other stuff that was in the cache.

I decided to take one travel bug mainly because I didn't have any travel bugs with me at the time. I didn't want to deplete the entire cache, but I did want to move at least one travel bug, so I settled on Pluto's Dog Tag, which wants to visit Disney themed area. I wasn't aware of this goal at the time, but I think I now need to set apart a weekend next month to get down and cache in the Anaheim area near Disneyland to get this travel bug closer to its goal.

When I was done signing the log and looking through everything, I closed it back up and walked over and handed it back to the man behind the counter. I'd heard about caches like this and have actually experienced one or two of them in the past. I actually think they are neat kinds of hides (this one has made my top 5% list) and I've often thought about creating one like it. I have a friend who owns a coffee shop near my school that I thought about approaching with this idea, but someone else has since placed a cache outside of their shop, so that's out. I also have another friend who owns a cake making business which is even closer to my school. They used to be our next door neighbors but we have since moved away.

Looking at the latest Geocaching map, the area is free of caches in the general area, so it would be possible to hide a cache in their facility. I'll have to think about this for awhile to see if it's even feasible, but I think it merits a possible thought or two. Who knows, perhaps in the near future, there might be a cache near my school entitled, Let Them Eat Cake.

Pictures were taken at or near the following geocache:
Lord of the Rings - by SpyBlade and SpySix