Some People Have No Idea...

Over the last week, I've had a few opportunities to experience the sometimes irrational actions of others.  I'd often assumed that the biggest threat to a cache was the chance of being "muggled".  If you're wondering what that means, allow me to explain briefly.  Geocachers refer to non-geocachers as "Muggles", and anytime a non geocacher interferes with, moves or destroys a cache, that cache is said to have been muggled.

So, as I was saying, I thought that being muggled was the main threat to a cache.  Not so as it turns out.  Last Sunday's caching expedition started off with a nasty experience.  Mrs Lemon and I had gone in search of our first "multi-cache" (that's a cache where you need to visit one or more locations before finding the actual cache) at a nearby lake.  Reading the logs before we went out, I learned that someone had left a chocolate easter egg in the cache previously, which someone had removed subsequently.

Now, food in caches is frowned upon, because it can go off or attract animals, which can destroy the cache trying to get to the food.  Or, as we discovered, in the case of chocolate, it can melt, covering everything in the cache with a lovely sticky film.  It was just lucky that there was a sink nearby, so I could get rid of the sticky mess after I signed the log book.

I'm not sure exactly what our next experience was.  Co-incidentally, this one happened on our second multi-cache.  Now, the etiquette of geocaching says that if you take an item from the cache, then you should leave something of equal or higher value.  Now, most things left in caches aren't exactly high value items anyway, but I'm fairly certain that most people would think an old movie ticket was a pretty poor swap.  Of course, it may not have been left as a swap, in which case, I'd think it was pretty poor form to discard your rubbish in someone's cache.

The third incident rounding off our caching WTF? trifecta appears to be a true case of a cache being muggled.  After Mrs Lemon and I found our first cache a couple of weekends ago, I'd mentioned geocaching to some of my co-workers, who thought this geocaching lark sounded like fun.  Anyway, they decided that they'd go and find the same cache that we did.  Problem was, when they got to GZ (cachers refer to the location of a cache as Ground Zero, or GZ for short), there was no cache to be found.  It was only a chance trip to the toilets that led them to find the cache.  The cache had been taken and tampered with, as the contents were soaking wet.

I have to admit that I was a little bit worried, given that I was the last person to log the cache before it was muggled, that I may have somehow contributed to the muggling of the cache.  However, I'm fairly certain that we weren't seen as we retrieved the cache, and that we left it exactly how we found it.  Apparently some people just have no respect for other people's property.  Bastards...