I posted my latest entry about the perils of using an ammo can as a geocache container just last night.  This morning, one of my news alerts sent me a story from Midland, Texas.

According to the story, three young people carried a package out to the mesquite grove next to a University of Texas building at 4 p.m. and then left the area.  Someone reported this to the police who investigated.  The Midland Police Department robot, Andros, X-rayed the package that said “10 blasting caps” on the side and found several toys inside. Investigators from the sherriff’s office said they’re going to be taking fingerprints from the container and looking for the people involved.

How many more incidents is it going to take before people learn?

If you are wandering through the woods and come across a metal box painted army green with a handle on top and bright yellow letters stencilled on it with the words "cartridge", "26.5mm", "10 round clips" and so on and maybe even an orange warning sticker with the universal explosive pictogram on it, what would you do?

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Thursday’s Metro Ottawa included a story that opened with the following:

A suspicious package attached to a pole forced the closure of Riverside Drive and a section of Ottawa’s bus Transitway for several hours yesterday.

That description made me think "I wonder if it was a geocache", so I popped over to the OttawaGeocaching.com forums to see if anyone had posted about it and sure enough, it looks like Dead End Cache (GC1DT9M), now archived, was destroyed by the bomb disposal robot.  At least it was "not deemed hazardous".

Pictures of the geocache from some of the logs show that it was a flat metal container with a green "official geocache" sticker on it.  In other words, another opaque geocache container on a bridge reported to the police as "suspicious".

While the hiding spot probably wasn’t the best choice (on a bridge over the Transitway), this incident probably could have been avoided if the container had been transparent.  Chances are that the person who reported it to the police wouldn’t have been concerned about it if it was a Lock ‘n’ Lock full of trinkets they could see into, and even if they did report it to the police, the police would very quickly have been able to determine there was nothing dangerous in it without having to open it.  Instead, the police ended up closing a section of the Transitway, and parts of Riverside and the overpass it was on for several hours, and paramedics, firefighters, the bomb squad and the Hazardous Materials Unit were tied up while it was being investigated.

So, let’s start using more transparent containers.  And, let’s stop placing geocaches in locations where people looking for it could be mistaken as doing something nefarious.

Update: I’ve fixed the link to the pictures.

My Donald the Sun Worshipper travelbug (TBGMFH) has been visiting geocaches in Denmark lately.  A relatively new geocacher who goes by the name martsviolen found him recently and took a couple of pictures of him on the beach in eastern Jutland.  Check out the pictures here.

I headed out into the sunshine and heat this afternoon to find a couple of geocaches near home.  The first cache I found was Urban Microcache 1 (GC4BC6), a large micro in a cluster of spruce trees.  That brought me up to 399 finds.

After a brief stop at the big grocery store in Westboro and some browsing in Busktukah, I headed off to find my 400th find.  It turned out to be GAG10 – The Urban Gnome (GC12CH9), near the intersection of Scott and Island Park.  In honour of this milestone, I dropped a travel bug I picked up from a geocache in Greece and released a geocoin (TB1P836).  The geocoin has the goal of reaching the Clock Tower of Nafplio (GC14CHW) in Greece.

After passing some time at the airport in Frankfurt, our flight to Athens took off.  I felt a bit sorry for the chap in the aisle seat next to me.  He was about 6′ 5" and was hawkishly watching a seat in the bulkhead row that was empty until just before takeoff.  Unfortunately for him, the person sitting in that seat showed up, so he had to spend the flight folded up like a pretzel.  We were flying on Lufthansa and they served a nice breakfast of some buns, bacon, ham and cheese, which I gather is a fairly typical German breakfast snack.  After breakfast, I was watched the ground for a while and then woke up to discover that we were offshore of Athens.

There was an airport near the coast that I thought we’d land at, but it quickly became apparent that we weren’t landing there because 1) we were way too high turning from the downwind leg to base, and 2) we didn’t turn final.  Instead we continued inland and shortly thereafter landed.

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I wrote this Sunday morning starting at about 5am airplane time (GMT+1).

Flight 872 from Toronto to Frankfurt is waking up. The cabin lighting has been switched from the deep blue night mode to a happy pinkish hue. I’ve been watching the dawn approach for about half an hour when there was just a light bluish tinge to the horizon. It’s now been joined by a dark orange band below it.

People are starting to move about the cabin and a cart full of “breakfast bits” just passed heading towards the front of the plane.

I was able to doze for a while, but I’ve been fidgeting in my seat trying to stretch out my legs. The seats on Air Canada’s 777W are quite comfortable as far as airplane seats go, but after several hours of sitting in I want to get up and wander about. But I didn’t want to wake my two seatmates, so I’ve had to make do.

<insert breakfast here>

Once breakfast was served, I got up and wandered about for a while. It felt good to stand up after sitting for so long.

The rest of the flight was fairly uneventful and we arrived in Frankfurt on-time. Clearance through customs was painless and the only thing about clearing security was that I forgot about a bottle of water that showed up on the x-ray. But, that really wasn’t a problem because when the security guy mentioned it I went “d’oh!” and retrieved it for him to throw out.

To pass the time before the next flight, I headed off to gate A42 with my parents to do a virtual geocache. Basically, you had to have your picture taken near the sign.

I’ll write more about the flight from Frankfurt to Athens and the time spent in Athens a bit later.