In retrospect, that is all of serendipity. Just the beginning of last year, my work sucked and I had been suffering over-loading for a long time. My boss didn’t care my feeling. A slut who I thought she may be my serendipity just cut off the connection because of a fucking weird reason. Stress, frustrating, anger and sadness all came to me. And the last straw that broke camel’s back is that my boss asked me to pick up someone’s slack. Even I’m a hard working guy who always goes the extra mile, that doesn’t mean I’m a coward. That shit is at my wit’s end, so I decided to call it quit. I told my boss ”I’m planning for so long, and I think it’s time for me to suspend my job and take a rest for 2 months.” My boss was speechless at that moment, and I still feel so good of seeing the expression on his face.
After one month, I started my temporary vacation. I had nothing to do except for going to the gym and Goldman for English classes. One day monkey came to me after class “ Hey, slut. Would you want to go hiking with Stephen, Maggie and me ? It’s a really easy hike.” I thought why not joining some new activity. So I replied to slut monkey ”Of course, I will join the hike with you guys!” Bam! That’s story started.
The next day, February 28th, we gathered at the scheduled time 7:00 and drove the way hell out in Yang Ming Mountain area─Datun Creek Old Trail. Stephen couldn’t make it due to he didn’t feel very well. So only we 3 sluts went hiking. After we geared up, we were ready to start our hike. And monkey said he was going to find some geocaches on the trail. Well, I have heard this GPS game they teachers always mentioned in the classes, but I never witnessed how it works. Let’s see how this game widen my vision. The first one we stopped in front of a weather station. Monkey reached his hand inside a mirror and took out a mini plastic case. ”I found it! ” he said in a plain tone like he already knew it’s there. I took a look at the ”cache”, it’s a mini case with a piece of paper folded inside with a lot of signatures. So interesting, I asked monkey ”who put the cache here”. “Someone playing this game put it here.” he replied to me. It was an alien stuff to me because I was that “muggle” who had no ideas this game existed for so long. We took a picture and then put it back into its original location, and I notices the case is with a magnet. So it can attach in the mirror. It’s indeed amazing.
Maggie and I were signing the log sheet.
After finding the first cache, we were going to start our “real” hike. Monkey led us to the trail which is a secluded one, because other hikers went to other trails. And it had been raining the whole week, so the trail was muddy and slippery. The whole hike we only ran into 6 hikers with professional gears. And I only wore sneakers for this hike. I fell down into the mud several times. I didn’t expect the hike is quite difficult for me even I usually go to gym for workouts. And monkey is like a really “monkey”, he walked so fast like jumping. We need to keep ours paces with him. I sweated like a pig, and my cloth was soaked. When we reached the top of the mountain, it was quite cold. I put out my jacket to prevent getting a cold. Some caches we couldn’t find at first time, and we took a detour and came back for 2nd attempt. The one on the top of mountain took us an hour to find it. I saw the perseverance of monkey and I am still impressed now. We searched almost every spot we can search. Monkey also called help to his “geo-friends”. Eventually, monkey found it ! We were so happy because we finally can go off the mountain and have our lunch! Hahahaha.
3 sluts found a slut cache for damn 1 hour!
After we were off the mountain, we went to a tacos restaurant in Tiamu to celebrate finishing the challenging hike. We had a good time and we talked a lot. Monkey and Maggie are very talkative, and we bullshitted a lot, hahaha. After we finished our food, I turned to monkey “What the cache will be in the cities? ” . Monkey opened his app and searched a closest cache he hadn’t found yet. Then we walked to that location. After about 10 mins walk, we arrived at GZ. It’s a free library station. But this cache is without hint. So we have to search every object we saw like weirdos. After my first attempt, I found a suspicious object, and I took to monkey for check. “Wow, you found it!” monkey yelled. So fun I thought it was just some weird stuff. And this is my personal official first find. The cache made my hiking day, and I feel so special to find the cache by myself. On way back to our parking lot, I was joking to monkey that I will apply a Geocaching account─Incredible_Kidd, I replaced Hulk to my name.
My first ever official find (in my opinion)
The next day when I woke up, my back was hurting due to the challenging hike. I have my words and applied the Geocaching account while resting at home. I logged the caches I found yesterday and saw some interesting logs from monkey. I took a look on the map, there are so many gray caches I couldn’t see. I asked monkey what are those caches? He explained to me they are different types of caches, you can still see them on website but only premium members can see them on the app. After a while, I received a mail that I was the premium now!! What a gift! Thanks that slut to give me a gift. I think maybe I can find some caches by myself. In the afternoon, I went out to a park which is close to my home. But with less experience and it’s odd for me to search a cache under a bridge. There were many muggles in the park. So I gave up to find that cache. That’s why I didn’t find any caches on March 1st. The next day, March 2nd , I went to the gym and finished my workout in the morning. A cache is just near my gym, so I attempted to find it and of course need on-line help from monkey. Since that day, I started my streak.
I was jobless for 2 months. So that is the best time to go geocaching and improve my English by joining English classes in parallel. That was my routine activity every day. Because I was a newbie, so I had to learn a lot of “skills” from monkey. Like ”tie your shoes”, “take photos or selfies”, etc. And I learned a lot of knowledge of hiding caches.
But I was a newbie, I admit that I didn’t know how to play this awesome game correctly. Sometimes I finagled the time I logged to keep my streak alive. After a while, I was aware that was not correct. And then I corrected to the right way of playing this game. Sometimes I drove way the hell in Timbuktu at night to achieve my FTF streak challenge. Even I was so scared, I still stuck to the plan. When I had business strip in Japan, I met many local geocachers. That was quite unique experience. There were so many good an unforgettable experience in the past year. In a nuts shell, I have been experienced a lot of new life because of Geocaching. I really enjoy it.
After 365 days of Geocaching challenge completed on “paper”, I set up a challenge cache for next crazy geocachers. That is just I wanna contribute my passion to this game. But after 3 months, I did a self-inventory by myself. I should complete this challenge again in a different and bad ass way to prove I’m a real tough cookie! So I decided to archive this cache. And then I started my streak challenge from 2020/6/2 again! So my journey is keep going now. Let’s see what else are waiting for me on my next challenge.
Long Live Geocaching ! Until next time….
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