F3 Futility – Pie in the Sky

TeamWolfie was hungry – and there’s no better place to feed two hungry geocaching wolves than a famous eatery on the old Pacific Highway that serves a delicious range of pies, and they are atop a mountain with a great view, and to top off a perfect lunch – a micro cache awaits us in their car park.

F3 Futility – Pie in the Sky (GC19236) is the first of stubby holder‘s caches we have encountered – and if this is the indication of the quality and thought stubby holder puts into all his/her caches, then we are really looking forward to finding a few more of them.

Being Sunday lunchtime this place was packed. Always very popular with bikers and tourists alike, but we managed to find a parking spot on the grass fairly close to ground zero.

But first things first – let’s eat. Surprisingly, getting a seat was a relatively easy process, and we woofed down 2 pies each and washed them down with a couple of bottles of the popular Bundaberg Ginger Beer before heading back to the car to plan our hunt. Thankfully even though this is a very popular place, the cache location is away from most of the activities, although we still had to be discrete and mindful not to be spotted by muggles in our search.

GZ lead us to the fence in a fairly sparse area with limited options for a cache hide, and if it weren’t for the fact I had seen this type of cache design on an American geocaching video podcast recently, there is every possibility I would never have discovered this cache.

This was a very clever and well designed custom-made cache.  We made sure muggles could not see us take the cache, and took it over to the car where we signed the log and examined its design in amazement.

The tricky part was taking it back – with groups of people coming and going, we had to choose our timing just right. Thankfully it was small enough to conceal while carrying, so it was just a case of waiting for the right time to return it to its home, which we did soon enough.

Smile for the muggles, Wolfie!

Not so lucky were we when we were taking a our trademark Wolfie picture of our dog (above). While I was taking this shot I didn’t realise a car load of muggles turned up and one of the older men in the car was pointing and laughing at me, obviously bemused by the fact that a grown man was taking a photograph of a stuffed dog.

Well, I guess the dog distracts attention away from the cache itself – and that’s the important thing in these cases. He’s our dog – and we love him.

Thanks again stubby holder for a fantastic cache.

Mystery of the Missing Mio

Late this morning we had a horrible sinking feeling as it dawned on us that one of the TeamWolfie members had “misplaced” our Mio in-car GPS navigator, somewhere, sometime, yesterday during our busy Saturday of caching.

After searching everywhere – in the car, in the backpack, in our pockets, we just had to accept the fact that we might have left it somewhere at one of the cache locations – so TeamWolfie returned to do some sniffing around, in the unlikely chance the Mio would still be there.

At this stage we’d pretty much accepted the Mio was lost, and never to be seen again – and already started planning it’s replacement. But not to be deterred we returned to Creek Shrub to try to retrace our exact steps as much as possible…  what were the chances?  Considering it was such a busy Sunday lunchtime, in a popular location full of muggles, we considered the chances of the Mio still being there pretty slim.

Remaining optimistic we approached the Creek Shrub cache site – the last place where we believe we may have left it – and sure enough, there it was, resting peacefully in the wet grass!  How lucky.  Thankfully, this particular cache is a little “removed” from heavy pedestrian traffic which tends to stick to the main pathways, and there had been no rain overnight.

The Mio was a little damp from the dew, but besides that (and a “couple” of ants) it seemed to be in excellent shape. Oh, and the battery was flat – of course.

We returned to the car, eager to plug the Mio in and see if it would power up after it’s night out under the stars – sure enough, it powered up fine. Good as new. Then another ant crawled out of the SD memory card slot.

“Funny,” we thought, “be funny if a heap of ants set up a nest in there…” said TeamWolfie member Guy.

Within a minute another two ants ran out the memory card slot.  It was starting to look like a few ants had indeed set up home in there.

As we headed back to home-based, another ant made it’s escape from the Mio’s memory card slot. This is now getting ridiculous, we thought.  So Guy gives the unit a gentle upside-down tap on the palm of his hand, and out falls about 10 ants, and some tiny white eggs.

It seems the ants had, indeed, set up a nest inside the Mio! The remaining trip home in the car was spent tap tap tapping the Mio and trying to get the ants out.  They just kept coming and coming and coming. I mean, how many more could there be?  It was only there for 24 hours!

We get home – tap tap tap some more over the kitchen sink – ants, and eggs, keep coming out of the Mio. There was definitely something in that GPS device they really loved.  Surely that’s all there is…. right?

Wrong.

So we leave the Mio in a (dry) sink while we watch a DVD…   come back and check – to find no fewer than about 100 ants crawling around in the sink.  My God!   How many ants can you fit into these things?

Tap tap tap – another 10 ants fall out.  Tap tap… MORE ants fall out.  I mean… this is seriously bad – these pesky little ants really had set up a serious full scale nest inside the Mio.

For the next 5 HOURS we intermittently tapped the Mio and sure enough, more and more ants would fall out of it. Fewer and fewer, and eventually we’re now at the point where we think we have most of them.

Mio - still working, but Ant-Ridden

The Mio is now in quarantine (a zip-lock plastic bag). We dare not leave it overnight – who knows what else is waiting to crawl out of it?