GC8YW4N – Dog Days #1
Welcome to the corner of UVic that used to be one of the best dog parks in town! The park is now closed but you can still walk Fido or find a cache outside the fence.
The container is quite narrow but just barely big enough to squeeze a flat trackable or two in there, along with the me0ws’ signature FTF prize: A scratch-and-win ticket!
This was our first ever 3-D Printed hide, and we love this because if the cache breaks we can just print another one – or print just the broken part. Very economical.
There isn’t much else to say about this cache except that it is our most-favourited, and one more thing about it. An amazing story, actually!
About a year after placing this cache, we got a private message on geocaching.com that the cacher couldn’t find the cache and it looked like the fence (it’s a FPC) had been very recently and completely replaced.
Well, I panicked and drove out to the cache site right away. First I checked on another cache – Dog Days No. 2 – we had hanging on the same fence. Sure enough there was a brand new chain link fence. Now I got worried, but maybe the cache had fallen off while the old fence was demolished? Pretty please, caching-gods?
Nope. The cache was hanging from the brand new fence right where I had hung it on the old fence 14 months before! What the h*** was going on here, I wondered. So then I made the somber drive down to my apparently-missing, highly popular cache site and the fence was completely replaced there too! I tried to pop off the post cap. Not budging. I was sure this one was gone.
I went home, and asked the most recent finder – who had logged their find just the previous day – where and how they found the cache. The happily responded that it was found basically as and where I had intended it, only in the new fence. So I went back with a piece of steel bar and gave that post cap a good whack from below and it popped right off. And there, smiling up at me, was Dog Days #1. I took it out, checked the log strip, there was the log from the cacher I had just DM’d. I looked below and found the wooden stick I had shoved down the original fence post to keep the cache at the right level. Amazing.
Someone on the fence replacement crew must have been a cacher, and took great pains to preserve and re-hide both of these caches as if that shiny new fence had always been there. To this day I have no idea who did it, but whoever you are, thank you so much!
In case you’re curious, here’s sort-of what it looks like.
