The First Steps

Our first steps are always the same. Slow, halting steps taken at home - or in this case, near home - that end with a bump to the backside. But before we get to that story, a goal, like any military campaign, must have a plan. Being a former Army man, I used the "Backwards Planning Procedure". This may sound goofy (perfect for Planet Thanet), but all it means is that before you can achieve success you must visualize it, take it apart into the required pieces, and put them in some sort of order.

Visualizing this success is easy, because Geocaching.com is linked into Google maps, allowing people to get a map that displays up to 500 geocaches. There were, at that time, only about 45 geocaches in Thanet, so it was relatively easy to get into Google maps through Geocaching.com and get a visual representation of Thanet with all the geocaches depicted. This is the picture today:

Geocaching.com does a neat thing: after you have logged a geocache as "found", it turns the icon on the map from the symbols you see above, to a smiley face. So visualize all the symbols on the map above (at least those north of the Stour and east of Reculver) as a smiley face and you are visualizing success.
The next part of the Backwards Planning Procedure is to figure out how to get to success from here. You don't need to be a genius, you just need a spreadsheet. So I looked up the names of all the caches and put together a spreadsheet with each cache's name, a "count" column and a "found" column and I was ready to go! Of course, I should have put a time boundary on the goal (OK, how about before we leave the UK?) and a road map of which caches to do in which order (I'm not that anal!), but what the heck - why not just get started ?
We had moved into our "new" house (N 51 deg 20.478min E 001deg 25.769min), which is reasonably near Ramsgate town center, the beach, and King George VI Park, a short time before. The King's Cache, a small traditional cache that is now archived, was supposed to be at N51 20.564 E001 26.040, just inside King George VI Park. The hint said "under the bench by the ivy covered stump". So I convinced my wife to come along for a walk and we set out to find it. Unfortunately, there was a significant amount of tree cover in the area, so the GPS receiver was having issues seeing the satellites. We got reasonably close, and started looking around. We found benches, but no cache. It is a beautiful park, with a nice children's play area and large grassy open areas and a refreshment stand that is open in the summer, but we just did not see which bench was the right one (there are many benches, quite a few stumps, and ivy all over). So we went home and I gave the spreadsheet a new column: "not found".
Faced with this first failure, I considered ... Do I (1) change the goal to a number of caches and ignore this cache (2) contact the cache owner and ask him for more clues or (3) go back by myself and figure out what I did wrong? Changing the goal is by far the easiest thing to do, since there are huge numbers of caches out there and SOME of them have to be easy. But persistence won the argument, so before e-mailing the owner I went back for a second look. Albert Einstein would probably tell you (if he were alive today) that in taking a second look, you should probably do something different. Approaching the cache from a different direction, I noticed a small bit of wood that may at one time have been a small bench attached to a wooden fence that was now overgrown with ivy. Nearby was a large (3 feet tall) stump, also covered with ivy. Sitting on the "bench" I reached down into the ivy and found the cache. The first step had not been pretty, but the journey had begun. Luckily the bench held while I filled out the log:
"Finally, four months since buying a semi-detached only a third of a mile away, I found time to visit this cache. Nice spot. Took nothing, added a generic US quarter. TFTC"
TFTC = Thanks For The Cache