We pulled into Wenatchee around 9:30 p.m. We tried calling Carl but he didn’t answer. We pulled into a drive way we thought was his, it wasn’t. Good thing the person didn’t come out and yell at us. Carl finally answered his phone and told us where to go. We were close. We drove up to the driveway and we went into the living room and met everyone. We met Carl’s (we thought she was his girlfriend) friend, BreeAnna. She had a lot to say and share. He gave us the tour of the place. A while later we were all getting tired so we unloaded the car. We settled downstairs in his office/studio because we were out of the way and less noise from upstairs (his refrigerator needed some help). We got situated, used internet for a while and passed out. I was gone after a few minutes and didn’t hear anything until the alarm went off at 5:45 a.m.
We zombied out of bed, got dressed, grabbed the stuff we needed and headed out the door. We plugged in the coords to the first cache and headed on down. We sorta took the wrong exit, went over the bridge and ended up in Wenatchee instead of East Wenatchee. We turned around and went the other way and barely made it to the park n ride before everyone left. Derek got out and asked a group from Oregon what to do. They asked if we wanted to cache with them today and we said yeah, it would be fun. They’ve done four cache machines already and kinda knew what do to. They had the maps printed off and a good idea on what we were going to encounter the rest of the day. We exchanged names, geocaching names, where we were from, what we did and other random info throughout the day.
We weren’t sure how many we were going to find but we could find up to 120 if you did them all on the list. We didn’t know Wenatchee very well so that made it a little more difficult. We found 67 the first day. I am not going to list them all but some memorable ones from our adventure.
Rock On Down the Loop was a pretty cool one. It was placed on top of a tunnel on the Apple Capital Loop Trail, which is a 13 mile loop around the city from bridge to bridge. It was completed in 1994. It is one of the longest loops in Washington State. It is popular with bicyclists, walkers, joggers and in-line skaters. In winter months, cross country skiers and snowshoers share the trail.
We walked down to the nearest bridge and found Rock On. There were at least ten people looking for this one. I ended up finding it on top of the rock, hence the play on word. We found a couple more in the area before we went across the bridge into Wenatchee to find a bunch more.
We hit up a bunch of parks, a pretty popular spot to hide geocaches. This is one I found in a park, Wenatchee City.
We moved on to a residential area and found a really cool fence cap hide, My 1st Posting.
We ran around the community college and found four of them. I remember playing fastpitch against the Knights back in 2006, when I played for WSU. We beat them. We found our first sprinkler head cache and the cobblestone “castle” was pretty cool.
Then the route took us back into the downtown area. Non Rolling Log was our next find. It brought us to the library. We used the bathroom and then found the cache. It was in the library under the reference section. I thought no one could hide a cache indoors. I found out you actually can as long as you have permission and it’s open to the public. That was my first indoor find.
We saw a lot of sculptures along the way. This was one of many, Watch By The Coyote.
We moved onto the Alley Series #1 and #2. We drove up to two groups of people putting it away as fast as they could. When they drove by, they said they made it harder than it actually was and good luck. We spent at least 15 minutes looking for it. I finally got this idea of looking at the cement wall for imperfections. Sure enough there it was hidden in a hole in the cement.
The second one of the series wasn't as time consuming or hard to find, actually it was pretty lame, someone didn't put it back right and it was laying on the ground. The next group of caches were near the walking bridge, so we headed on over that way. We tried looking for the one on the bridge but with 30 of us, we came up short. We headed back to the car and had some lunch before moving on to the next group of them. We headed over toward the trains and the railroad tracks for Thomas and Friends.
Cache #35 was Oh Let Me Shine Upon You 2. We drove up and saw at least 15 people searching under rocks frantically. We started turning over rocks. Then one of the cachers called the cache owner to ask for a hint. They said it was near the sign and under a rock, just keep looking. I started turning over rocks and one didn't turn over quite that easy. I had to pull it out of the ground. Everyone was saying I was their hero!
I was on my way for another milestone when we found Whitman Way. That was my 400th cache. Last week at the Bonney Lake event was my 350th. It was our first guard rail cache in Wenatchee.
We went over behind the retail stores to find Shoo. I knew what we were looking for. Carl and BreeAnna joined us for a few of them. We got Carl hooked and now has his own name.
Then the cache machine took us to the waterfront on the Wenatchee side. Lots of walking on the trails and it started raining. Here is Waterdog42 and Oregongatorboy putting the cache back at London Bridge.
We found caches at the Toyota Civic Center, where the Wenatchee Wild play their hockey games, found one at the Sonic, found one near the cemetery in a tree, found fake rocks, lots of magnetic key holders and some altoid tins.
My group and I even got a LTF (last to find). We got to Off The Path and a guy and his grandson pulled up in a orange vehicle. He said "did you know this was private property?" We stood there and stared at the guy. Cacher "The Ghost" took him aside and explained what we were doing. Apparently this was his private property and as the owner no one had come and asked him to place a cache on his land. He had a problem with it and asked for us to remove it. He took the property owner out to the location and retrieved it. I guess there's a first and a last for everything.
From there we found a couple more in the area, Fish N Shrimp, Merry Christmas Navigators, Bridge View (which took several of us a long time to find it) and Senior. We tried looking for the last two which we didn't find. We found out later both were missing. By that time it was time to wrap it up and head on out to the Chinese Buffet. It was raining and everyone was hungry.
We headed over the bridge and luck would have it, THE WENATCHEE APPLE SIGN!! I was so excited to see it! This is one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Wenatchee. I asked Derek if there was a cache here and there was, My Town. We spent a couple minutes taking pictures and looking for the cache.
I really wasn't feeling Chinese food so I asked Derek if Sonic would be an okay place to have dinner. He agreed and we got a couple of burgers, fries and limeades. We took it back to the event and scarfed it down in no time. I didn't realize how hungry I was. We finished up, got out of the car and took pictures of the travel bugs on the vehicles. We went inside and found a place to sit. We sat next to our Oregon buddies and visited for a while. We wrote down and took pictures of everyones coins and travel bugs. About an hour and a half later everyone started getting tired and started to leave. Some had a long drive back that night and others stayed in town. We made it back to Carl's house. Derek took a shower while I logged my finds and then I went and showered while Derek logged his finds. I got really tired around 10:45 p.m. and had to pass out. As soon as my head hit that pillow I was out.
Next adventure: Nisqually Pirate Cache
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