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?

Not the Prime Ministers Hill

After a run of seven successive cache-finds this morning, TeamWolfie made their way to the last planned location for the day, appropriately named for the location: Not the Prime Ministers Hill.

Ironically, we were oblivious to the fact we’d left our Mio navigator just laying on the ground at the last cache location – we just both assumed it was in the backpack. Furthermore – on arriving here, we decided just to use the iPhone for this one because it seemed more convenient.

Another beautiful and scenic location with amazing views. After a 30 minute search we gave up. We had all the clues, the iPhone’s GZ seemed to be zeroing around an obvious location that matched the description and clues – but this cache was not to be ours today.

Nonetheless we had already had a very successful caching day – netting a total of SEVEN out of EIGHT attempted finds, so I guess we had to be happy.

We headed off, and decided to get a few caching supplies on the way home.

Creek Shrub

Within an easy and pleasant 300m walk from Diving’s Prohibited was our next GZ – Creek Shrub.

I’m going to list this find in our “Bad Experiences” category too – not because of anything about the cache – it’s a great cache, in a great location – but for the fact we left one of our GPS devices behind at the site – and we didn’t even realise it until the next day. I’ll write some more about that in another post soon.

Creek Shrub is located in the same string of waterfront parks as Diving’s Prohibited – although this cache is a little larger, given the better opportunities in this location to hide a slightly larger cache.

We were thrown off a little by our GPS at first. The clues for this cache mentioned a tree stump, and ironically our GPS guided us directly to such a stump.

Wolfie barking up the wrong stump

We were convinced this HAD to be the stump – after all, the GPS units were pinpointing it. But as is the case with GPS – you can’t always trust it, and sure enough GZ soon moved a little closer to the real stump we were looking for, and after a brief forage, we located the cache.

This was a great little find, we signed the book, left a Pokemon Hypno card, and we took a Travel Bug.  We also left our Mio in-car GPS navigator on the ground when we left… but that’s another story.