A Happy Ending

Sunday evening, just before dusk, I went out to find a quick cache. There's a few caches behind SMMC here in Biddeford, and I went and found one of those rather quickly, then headed home.

Monday morning, I had some time to play with, so I looked up a cache that I could find real quick before heading to work. I quickly discovered that I couldn't find my PN-40 and tore my apartment looking for it, to no avail. It didn't dawn on my until I was at work that I may have left my GPS on the rock next to the cache, so when I got out of work, I went looking around the cache site to see if I could find it. Nope. I looked around for ten minutes and came up empty. The only thing I found was a tick on my arm (fortunately, it hadn't embedded itself under my skin and I was able to kill it real quick).

I figured at this point that I had left my GPSr in my car overnight and it became a victim of car shopping (around my neighborhood, some of the teeny-boppers like to go around, see if a car is unlocked and take anything that is of value, like GPS units, iPods, cell phones, etc). So I began looking for a new GPS (I have an old yellow Garmin, but the resolution on the screen is falling apart).

Wednesday afternoon, I got a phone call on my cell phone from a woman who was walking along the same path and found my GPS. On the PN-40, you can put some basic information on the start up screen, so I put "Kevan's Unit" and my cell phone number. She said that she had been walking down the same path and spotted it on the rock that's next to the cache and grabbed it because she thought someone was working nearby and left it there.

So, I'm happy to report that a fairly well used but still fully functional PN-40 and it's owner are now happily reunited. I'm just glad that I had some forethought and put that information on the start up screen.

I'm glad you found it. It's always a good idea to have a contact information attached to your GPS/camera/cellphone/what ever. You can either attach a sticker on it or create a file on a memory card with your contact information. If you haven't done so, RIGHT NOW is a good time.

Another advantage of using a smart-phone for geocaching is when you loose it, you can ring it :)
When I send a special text message to my cellphone, it will reply with its GPS coordinates back so I can go and retrieve it.

It just goes to show that there are still great people out in the world that will return things!! :) Happy that you were able to get it back!