This weekend found me in New York, NY. I know that I live in Maine and that as such I am a bit, shall we say, removed from the mainstream, but every time I come to this city I am baffled by the sheer magnitude of it. For the record, I’m no hick living in the boonies, I grew up in Boston and I’m no stranger to city life. New York is simply an entirely different world though.
My best friend, Robby, grew up in Manhattan, near Times Square, and he still lives in the neighborhood he grew up in. He is a gracious host whenever I’m in town, and I am grateful for the “tour guide”. He’s good about taking me to the best local places for food and such, its great to get the NYC experience from a true New Yorker.
Whenever I travel I try to grab a geocache or two, and I thought it would be really cool to take Robby geocaching. He is the kinda guy who will never need a GPS in his life, not if they don’t have subway maps on them. I told him about geocaching, and he was, in true NYC fashion, both cynical and skeptical of it. “A treasure hunt?” he said “Am I gonna have to dig around some tree in Central Park or something?” I assured him that no excavations would be necessary, downloaded a few caches into Topo USA, edited the comments to get what I wanted, transferred them into the PN-20 and we set off for a little concrete caching in the urban canyon. I turned off all the POI’s so that the map wouldn’t be too cluttered and we headed east.
The apparent trick with caching in such an uber-urban environment is size and stealth. All the posts I’d read noted that it can be difficult to be subtle and unnoticed when seeking a cache say, near the corner of Broadway and 5th Ave, and there aren’t exactly an abundance of places to hide a standard size cache, therefore most of the caches are small or “micro”, trickier to find, but by no means impossible. I thought that the tricky part was going to be actually finding and logging the caches without drawing an inordinate amount of attention upon ourselves. I also had the thought that we might look extra suspicious to the abundance of NYPD officers in the area. I was not looking to have to explain why I was hiding a little box in a public space to a cop.
I had, however, forgotten the fact that nothing looks odd to a New Yorker, a knowledge which Robby took full advantage of. In searching for one cache he was basically climbing around on a piece of industrial artwork in a small park in the Chelsea neighborhood. This was when I realized city-boy skeptic Robby had gotten into the “treasure hunt”. While this was a gratifying moment for me, it was not brought to full fruition due to the fact that we were unable to actually locate the cache. In reviewing the logs I’d read that several other cachers had been unable to find it over the previous few days. Noting that the space between the artwork and the wall behind it was apparently someone’s “home”, we decided that the probability of this cache being corrupted was pretty high, and moved on.
The second cache we were going after was in the Flatiron district, a short walk away. The hints were very important on this one; unfortunately I did a poor job editing the comments and the last couple of hints were cut off on the PN-20. Robby was holding the answer in his hands: IPhone. I sat on a nearby bench and signed into Geocaching.com to view the hints while Robby went running around with the PN-20, getting as close to the cache as possible. I thought that a fun role reversal. We were successful in locating and logging the cache, and Robby decided that Geocaching was cool and tried to hit me up for a PN-20. I told him I might be able to get him a good price.
Our caching for the day completed we headed off for Chinatown in search of excellent fried dumplings. I was tempted to use the PN-20 to do a POI search, but I relied on Robby’s instincts instead. I was not disappointed.
Until next time…
-Brian
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