Ryan Chartrand
OCEANO DUNES – In the afternoon hours of last Sunday, a group of GPS-savvy Geo-cachers were thwarted in their quest to locate a small metal box filled with wondrous trinkets by what are referred to as “muggles,” or non-participants in the game.
Geocaching, or the sport of spending large quantities of money on GPS devices and then using these to locate hidden containers filled with prizes whose value is several orders of magnitude less than said GPS devices, is growing rapidly in popularity.
The governing rule is that you cannot take prizes for free and must replace them with an item of equal or greater value. Also, watch out for muggles! People who are not participating in the game are forbidden to see the geocache, because they will loot the contents. Beginning Geocachers usually have trouble finding the caches, Intermediate Geocachers will have trouble carrying their exponentially growing number of cheap prizes, and Advanced Geocachers have no trouble at all navigating to the bank and discovering a loan or second mortgage.
The Geocachers, on foot and off the trail in an environmentally sensitive area that specifically warned hikers to stay on the trail, encountered six children in the proximity of their final coordinate.
“They mean-muggled us,” said survivor Lee Thompson. “There were six children living in a hideaway beneath the tree canvas with sleeping bag beds. They were smoking cigarettes and drinking malt liquor – you could see used condoms scattered among the rubbish, and we heard fireworks going off from within the leafy den – it was on dead top of our coordinate. I stepped in there and explained politely that we were a team of Cal Poly engineering majors with a targeted global positioning coordinate in the middle of their hideaway. One of them answered ‘go big or go homo’ and the rest of them cackled like Oprah Winfrey fans.
“We thought about charging back in there brandishing the machete we had brought in case of thick foliage to scare them out, but decided against it given the chance they might have had a gun.” Thompson looked frightened, and then added “Or pet tiger.”
“We didn’t leave completely empty handed – I remember somebody in our group yelled excitedly that they found a working Maglite flashlight buried in the sand,” said expedition leader Charlie Feinstein. “Right after that, I heard a high-pitched prepubescent voice from the trees whining about a flashlight. The little buggers are probably still scared of the dark.”
Tired, muggled and unsuccessful for the fifth time in their first five Geocaches, the Geocachers retreated from the site to a local seafood bar for shrimp cocktails and margaritas. There, they discussed contacting social services and debated whether the wild children should be captured or returned to society, and bounced checks for the shrimp cocktails and margaritas because they had forgotten about the checks they had written earlier in the week for GPSs.