Jill and I didn't have very much time on Saturday (had to run some errands, including getting cat food and litter as well as getting the car washed) to go geocaching, but we wanted to do at least one since we had entered about six caches in the area as waypoints in the GPS. Jill had printed a couple of the descriptions out but neither of them sounded like quick hikes, so we instead decided to try the nearest one closest to our home in NW DC, on the hope that it couldn't be that difficult.

Coming from Rockville, I kept the GPS on the edge of the door, which enabled it to keep a lock on enough satellites to direct us back to DC. For some reason I had thought the closest one to us, Duck Trial, (that was an actual, physical cache, and not one of the virtual ones) was in Maryland, but when we arrived at Western avenue (the NW boundary of the District) and the GPS continued to point us towards the interior, we realized our mistake.

The distance between us and the site continued to lessen, until we finally got to Arizona (grrr--just got a speeding ticket in the mail from when I was on Arizona a month ago--DC uses these sneaky parked cars that take photos of you as you go past--I was doing 40 in a 25) and were within a third of a mile of the cache. We parked in a local neighborhood just off Arizona, and took the pedestrian bridge over to a hidden park. I've been living in the district for four years and had never known about this park with a nice baseball field and three tennis courts in great shape (no cracks in the surface, and the nets were in perfect condition--the only negative was some spraypainted graffiti between a couple of the courts).

The GPS started going a little wonky on us because of the tree cover (these things like a clear view of the sky to work best), but we persevered, even striking out through the bush at one place (we later found the path we should have been on--something I hope we get better at as we learn more about this game). When we were within 30 feet of the cache, at the accuracy range of the GPS, I started combing the area for the hidden box. Jill, however, put her thinking cap on and used a combination of watching the GPS signal and looking towards the ground for tracks. Sure enough, after about five minutes, we found our first hidden cache.

We had brought a copy of A.S. Byatt's Possession to leave in the cache (which it did, but just barely) and took a set of superfine markers left by a previous cacher (all my pens are fine or extra fine--I like thin thin lines when writing). There was a disposable camera in the cache, but unfortunately all the photos had already been taken--instead, someone had given me a disposable camera from the International Spy Museum for my birthday the day before and I used it to take a picture of Jill holding the lid of the cache to document our first find.

All in all, it probably took us 20-30 minutes to find. We had a nice hike and discovered a new park just a mile or two near us that we had never known about. I think this GPS thing is going to be worthwhile.