My first Geocache

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Wednesday, April 7th, 2004: Found my first Geocache today! Me and Tricia went out to find it and it was a very easy one. It was at the House for Miss Lucy, something I’d read a lot about in my Alton history books but never actually visited. It wasn’t a very interesting find, just a small film container with a paper full of signatures inside it. We signed it and put it back. We wanted to do some more searches but I’d only printed out the Lucy cache so we went to Hayner library and printed out a few more.

Our next stop was to the Piasa Bird caves. The GPS took us around the side of the cave in the car. We were surprised to see concrete barricades staggering the road that I had to zigzag around. When I got to where the GPS stopped, I noticed a security guard booth and a policeman (a policeman, not a security guard) walked out of it and stood there looking at us. Tricia says to him, “We were, uh, just turning around.” and I leave. I have no idea what’s over there that would require that kind of security. We went back to the Piasa Bird and looked around for awhile. The cache was supposed to be under some rocks. We kind of wonder if the whole thing was a scam just to get people to drive up to a high security place and be harassed by the police.

After a quick stop at Taco Bell, we went to our last search on Smallpox Island, right across the bridge from Alton. By this time it was completely dark outside so it’s a good thing we brought my Mag Lite. This one was interesting because you had to go to some coordinates, read the smallpox memorial to get clues to NEW coordinates. Then you went to those and counted the number of stairs to the top. After that it was kind of a letdown. I’m supposed to email the number of steps to this guy and I’m not sure what I’ll get in return for that. Probably nothing. But we had a lot of fun doing all this. There seems to be a lot of caches in the Alton area so I’m going to print them all out and do a lot more this weekend.