WG & WH803 MAKE THE FTF (with an oddity thrown it)

If you've read along much at all, you know what most of the title means: Wiscongranny (wife person Joyce) and Woodhick803 (me) made the First Time Find on a cache.

FTF'ing, recording that special first time find, is one of the little extras in the geocaching world. It's fun for some reason, being the first one to that new and shiny hide. The owner is waiting with bated (well maybe not entirely) breath hoping that someone will hurry to his or her newly concealed treasure chest. And sometimes there's an extra gift for those who make that one time only find. A little money, a store gift card, an extra clever toy or...who knows what awaits the FTF'er.

Today we headed out early for the Cranberry Glades Wilderness and Monongahela National Forest to search for one of those newly hidden treasure boxes & we were successful in our hunt.

A short and pleasant walk on a clear and wonderfully cool morning (the entire East Coast has been under a heat wave the past few weeks) took us to within a few yards of the cache. Then it was a short bush whack to a likely site & voila!! We found it!!

Wiscongranny shows off our find. Note the FTF gift bag. Like most everything stored or hidden in a cache it's a simple ziploc bag--where would hikers and hiders be without them?? Note too, that's real money in there. $10.00 worth!! And like other FTF cash we've found, it will never be spent, but rather it will be placed on our growing shelf of swag--Stuff We All Get--remember?? Our shelf of toys and treasures now holds several FTF goodie bags too. How cool is that--if you are a geocacher that is.

Look again at the open cache Wiscongranny is displaying. See the small item dangling down the front?? Kind of hard to make out, but it's a travel bug (TB) attached to a stuffed mermaid figure, officially named "Marlee the Mermaid". Now here's the oddity of our find and picking up the Mermaid TB, it is owned by my sister BatikFreak10. She had placed it several weeks ago in one of her caches so that it could make its way to Key West FL, fitting country for a mermaid indeed. And I had no idea at all that Joyce and I would find it here in today's FTF cache. Odd indeed.