Shiltonpigs "First" First to Find

Friday 19th February 2010

Wow! What an evening...never in a million years did we think we would find a cache first...otherwise known as a first to find or FTF.

The story starts in a warm cosy living room watching a film with the fire blazing and team shiltonpig all cuddled up and warm...Mr Shiltonpig was looking at the Emcache website, when up pops someone saying....ooh a new cache has just appeared in Ashby de la Zouch. Mr Shiltonpig tells Mrs Shiltonpig and after looking at each other going "shall we go for it"...we decide...yup!

We grab the cache bag and of course take time to make Josh aka Shiltonpiggy nice and warm, we rushed to the car and started on the journey along the road....all kinds of thoughts were going through our heads...not being premium members means we are always too slow to find a cache first, but the fact this cache was published on a dark evening meant we were in with a chance.

Its hard to explain the adrenaline rush that this particular cache provided us, and had to be up there with our best cache experience! By the time we had drove down the country lanes, we realised that we were now in blizzard conditions with snow coming down fast.

In addition we had never been caching at night before....(night caches are a different kind of cache and we hope to do one soon, will explain the difference when we do one), so was unsure if the gps would even work...however Mr Shiltonpig switched it on and after some rare moments 5 satellites kicked in and hey bingo we were in busy....you can see the conditions we were walking through in pitch darkness to the left. And if the isn't good enough for you, we took a close

up of the snow as well...just to show you how crazy these particular geocachers really are!

So anyway when we switched on the gps we were a mere 300 ft away....soon 200 ft...120ft, 80 ft and finally we were at the correct location!

In front of us lay a log.....in the dark with only a torch and Josh as company, we realised that finding this cache may not be as straight forward as we thought, however Mr Shiltonpig shoved his hand around many different parts of the log, when finally he noticed something strange and sure enough after getting a pile of thorns in his hand, Mr Shiltonpig found it and generated the first photo in this log!

The feeling of finding our "first" first to find was brilliant! The snow was coming down heavy, but we didn't notice....I'm sure some song out there talks about doing something silly everyday, well today we met our quota!

When we opened the cache and spotting the empty logbook and a sealed bag it was in, was music to our ears! We had finally found it, after 78 previous attempts and 2.5 years and 1 child! But it was worth it......

This was our craziest and fastest cache to date, but there is no doubt that this cache will remain in our memories for a long long time to come!

The drive home in blizzard conditions was a mere blur as we reflected on a very very strange 30 minutes....but well worth it....

No doubt about it...geocaching at its best!