Blackberry Picking and Geocaching

A common acronym among geocachers is TOTT which stands for Tools of the Trade and can mean anything from tweezers to pull logs out of small containers to extension ladders for those caches hidden in trees.

My favorite TOTT is the Oldest Island Boy.

He can climb trees, isn't scared of snakes or bugs AND he has an uncanny knack for spotting particularly hard to find caches.

I took him and a friend with me the other day to find a cache hidden in some rocks next to a bridge. Caches hidden in places like that can be hard to find so I knew I wanted him in on the hunt.

We got to the cache location and I realized that my favorite TOTT has a major flaw.

Blackberries.



There were blackberries growing everywhere on the rocks and the Oldest couldn't stop picking and eating them long enough to even look for the cache.



I looked over at one point and realized he was just sitting down in the middle of the berries eating – no cache hunting at all.



I'm a sucker for blackberries myself so I decided to join him.

A comfortable rock to sit on, a nice view and more blackberries than you can imagine.



Heaven.

Once we were stuffed we started searching again and within moments he spotted the cache.

All in all, we were there for about half an hour but it only took about five minutes to find the cache.


Sometimes, you just have to stop and eat the berries.

Labels: