A Leap Year Geo Quest

   Note to my non-geocaching friends:  for an explanation of geocaching, click here .  

   Glancing at my geocaching.com statistics page late last year I saw above my twelve-month grid that I had logged caches on 244 days of the year. I thought that was pretty good until I realized that I’d not logged anything on 122 days. That’s exactly one third of the year. Since this is a leap year, only the second in the eight years I’ve been caching, I figured this was a perfect time to get rid of all those zeroes and show at least one cache logged for each day of the year.

   It’s September now and I’m three-quarters through the quest. I needed only one for this month and that was on the 9^th so I thought I’d sit down and write about how it’s going before next month’s quest days roll around.

   It didn’t start out well. New Year’s Day was a Sunday and I’d slated my first quest find for the trip home from church. Maybe it was the fact that I was in my church duds and didn’t want to get dirty or that the wife was waiting in the car, my first quest cache was logged as a DNF (did not find). Fortunately, I’d programmed a backup hide and got it on the way to my daughter’s New Year’s Day gathering. The quest had officially begun--1 down, 121 to go.

   My dictionary defines a quest as an adventurous journey in search of some thing or goal. My goal is to remove a bunch of zeroes from a grid on the Internet. In that regard, it’s definitely a quest. The jury’s still out on the “adventurous” part. While I tried to seek caches hidden in the woods such as my eight-find hike through the Milestone Cache Corner in the Cook County Forest Preserves on Leap Year Day, many finds were PNG’s (Park n' Grab, easy hides in parking lots). It was brutally hot this summer and the thought of traipsing through the woods soaked in sweat and DEET didn’t appeal to me. Now that autumn is here in northeastern Illinois and the weather’s cooled, I’ll head back into the woods for more adventure.

   How’s it going? So far, so good. I’ve logged finds on the first 84 of the quest days with 38 left to go. Now it gets interesting. The months of October and December are very busy for me. Most days I leave for work just after sunrise and head back way after dark. There are no days off, either. I’ve set aside a good number of PNG’s for those days. Will they be enough? I’ll let you know in January.