Shakespeare for Geocachers | The Geocaching Junkie

I’m often asked where I get the inspiration for some of my blog posts. I am quite lucky in that regard, as I find inspiration in a variety of places. A couple of months ago, I was scrolling through my Facebook feed and came across one of those clichéd inspirational quotes. You know the ones in elaborate ‘handwritten’ fonts on a background of someone standing at the corner of a lake staring off in to the middle distance? This one read:

 Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises

The quote was attributed to William Shakespeare. I quickly verified this was indeed the case (you never can trust this kind of thing). My initial thought when I read the line was: “that’s exactly how I felt when I tried to get FTF on that really long multi and was beaten by just 5 minutes.” Who knew the Bard was quite so …. relatable?

Stephen Marche, author of the book How Shakespeare Changed Everything, says of the famous playwright: “he is relatable to the most diverse group of people any writer has ever related to in human history.” But was my discovery of this inspiring quote and its application to my geocaching experience just a coincidence? A one-off? Some perfunctory research has led me to believe that, in fact, Shakespeare was inspiring geocachers before anyone even knew what geocaching was…

1. When you pick up a rock thinking it’s the cache, but it turns out it’s just a rock

2. When you find a cache that others have DNFed several times before you 

3. When you’re trying to work out the final of a multi cache, but you’re unsure whether or not 2 is the answer for B

4. On the First to Find struggle: 

5. When you want to go geocaching in the winter, but the weather conditions are not favourable 

6. When you drop the lid of a nano cache and can’t find it anywhere

7. When someone else has already looked in a spot but you have to check yourself or you won’t believe the cache is not there

8. When you have to cross a river on some slippery rocks to get to the cache 

9. When you spend the weekend caching and it’s suddenly Monday again

10. When someone says in their log that they hid the cache ‘better’

11. When you’re going for a group FTF and the person who opens the logbook sees a signature already there and is trying to prepare the rest of you for the bad news

12. That feeling when you’re First to Find

13. When a muggle overhears a conversation between two geocachers

14. When you see someone on a geocaching Facebook page making a ridiculous statement

15. When the local FTF hound is out of town and a new trail of caches gets published

16. When you decide to log a DNF upon not finding a cache, and not a Found it, because… 

Shakespeare really knew what he was talking about, you know.

Happy Caching!


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