Geogirl - Kelly Rysten

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from parking lot to parking lot looking for magnetic hide-a-keys and peanut butter jars placed in the landscaping.

      At the storage facility we had to shell out big bucks for… space. I wasn’t used to spending money just to have a space to put things in, but if it meant going geocaching or not going geocaching I decided I had to make the sacrifice, so when we were through there I didn’t mind so much that Twiggy was buying my lunch. We sat at Donner’s, which was known for their chicken fried steak, and squinted at the screen of Twiggy’s laptop. Donner’s was near the university and they didn’t mind students coming in and nursing a cup of coffee all night while they studied or read. The only disadvantage to Donner’s was that they also didn’t mind if the students played the jukebox and the jukebox had internet access so there was no telling what kind of garbage might blare forth from it while students were trying to nurse a cup of coffee and read a book. It was terribly unnerving to be reading a romance novel to the tune from some Swedish rock band. Sometimes they didn’t even carry a tune. They just made noise. I guess college students think it makes them look cultured if they like foreign music. I heard a lot of Swedish, German, and Japanese music at Donner’s. I was used to the music my parents listened to and I hardly ever heard that at the diner.

      “We’re right here,” Twiggy said as we squinted at the geocaching map. I couldn’t even recognize the city because of all the little boxes that represented caches.

      “Zoom in a little,” I said.

      “Nah, we know where we are, the thing is we have to fill in our Fizzy Grid before we get to the event.”

      “Oh no!” I mockingly wailed. “I packed my Fizzy Grid. It’s in the box labeled Gwen’s bookcase.”

      “No you didn’t. Your Fizzy Grid is online. And half your boxes were labeled Gwen’s bookcase.”

      “I had three bookcases, a bed and a closet. What do you expect?”

      He brought up my profile page and scrolled down. We came to a chart. I was good at charts. I even charted my tooth brushing routine.

      “This is your grid. To fill in the Fizzy Grid we have to fill in all the combinations of terrain and difficulty ratings with a find. Right now you have mostly 1.5/1.5 caches. That’s normal under your circumstances.”

      “Then why did you pick me as a partner? You should have picked somebody with more experience.”

      “It not about the numbers,” he said. “It’s the journey. That’s what you haven’t learned about geocaching yet. It’s what you discover on the way to the caches that really makes it fun.”

      “Then why do we have to find all these terrain ratings and difficulty ratings?”

      “We don’t have to find all of them. It’s just that the more we find the more likely we are to win. I think we need to give you a crash course in geocaching. We’ll find some easier ones in places you aren’t used to searching to mark off some of these in between difficulties before we try for a five/five.”

      “Oh, good. You know what they say, you can’t five/five until you three/three.”

      “You could, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I don’t know about you but I’d rather find interesting caches than just ones that fill the grid. So we need to do some research. We’re here. And we have five hundred miles of the good old USofA to use for a playground on the way.”

      He traced a highway that went from where we were to the middle of the country.

      “Uh, one problem,” I said. “We can’t save the very hardest caches for the town the event is in. Look, there is no hard terrain in the plains.”

      “There could be,” Twiggy said. “If they make us hike ten miles to get to it.”

      I frowned. “I think this will require some research.”

      “And you’re just the girl to do it.”

      “Show me how the program works.”

      While he showed me the ins and outs of the geocaching site we ate lunch, dessert, had coffee, visited the restrooms, had another coffee, visited the restrooms, debated whether we were drinking too much coffee, argued that soda had just as much caffeine and more sugar than coffee, and then debated whether or not we should just stay for dinner. I thought I learned more sitting at Donner’s than I had in my whole semester of Geography 101. I learned how to find the caches in a given area, how to sort them by when they were found, when they were placed, who placed them, who found them, who liked them, how well liked they were… I really liked the idea of searching for them by the number of favorite points. That way we could weed out the ones nobody liked and concentrate on the ones that people thought were cool, fun, interesting, or in a good location. This was research I could get my head wrapped around! It was like planning a vacation around tiny mysteries! I jumped into the search with both feet, finding all the best caches in town, then I realized I had to find the best caches in each town between Franklinburg and the event. And when I looked closer at the map I found out the caches were everywhere! How could I find the right terrain and difficulty levels at locations along our route? Twiggy showed me an advanced search that would create a list for me, but I either came up with too many caches, or too few. And I didn’t know whether the caches it listed were good ones or not.

      “Gabby, come up for air every once in a while,” Twiggy said.

      “I think I need to just do it by hand,” I said. “I want to pick the best of the best. I want to explore underground and climb mountains. I want to be Sherlock Holmes searching for those itty bitty…”

      “Nanos,” he reminded me.

      “Yeah, those itty bitty ones. And I want to find a huge one too! How big is the largest cache you’ve found?” I asked.

      “Oh, I’m guessing it was about four feet long and a foot in diameter.”

      “What was it?” I asked.

      “I think it was a mortar tube or something. It looked like it came from a military surplus store.”

      “Wow! Can we find one like that?”

      “You’re the planner and navigator,” he said. “Which reminds me, we need to go get our wheels.”

      “But we have wheels,” I said. “I have a car and you have a car.”

      “Do we really want to cram all your stuff and all my stuff into a two door sedan?”

      “What are you going to do?”

      “You’ll see.”

      After dinner I got a surprise, one I wasn’t quite prepared for.

      “Hey man! Thanks for trading! This’ll be so cool!” said a fellow student I had never met. He was talking to Twiggy and Twiggy had just traded his two door sedan for a very used, very old, Chevy van. A van? My mother would be horrified! She would say, “Do you know what men have in mind if they pick you up in a van?”

      And I’d say, “Mom, I’m not stupid.” Except that I really trusted Twiggy and he had a point. My clothes wouldn’t even fit in his car. I looked at the olive green monstrosity and tried to think of it as a truck that holds more passengers. That idea quickly flew out the window when they flung open the sliding door and the walls were covered with zebra striped fake fur and the floor had a remnant of purple carpet laid from the back of the driver’s seat to the back door of the van. At least they removed the girlie magazines, I thought.

      Twiggy tossed his keys to this other man and took the keys to the ugly, olive green machine I would come to call The Cacheamolé because it was used for geocaching and it was avocado green.

      “See ya in August,” Twiggy said.

      “Yeah, see ya,” the other man said.

      Twiggy tossed all our belongings into the green van, slapped me happily on the shoulder and opened the passenger’s door

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