Casual Geocaching?

With Drie (Firefly03) visiting friends and family for a long weekend, I decided to do some "casual Geocaching" and photography Saturday. The original plan had been to go shooting (photos) with a buddy, but that fell through when his plumbing project took a horrible turn and he needed to stay to fix it. As a sat that morning getting the GSPRs (both the Oregon 300 and the GPSMap 60CSx) ready and the cameras packed, the phone bleeped off new cache publications within about seven miles. So I loaded up with the GPSRs through the Garmin Communicator plug-in and "Send to GPS" button on the cache page (I had both units connected via USB and switched via the pop-up -- very fast way to load the new caches) and took off. The first attempt was a bust as both unit pointed to the curb of the loading area and I had no clue what I was looking for. The next attempt was across the street though -- an older cache I'd been wanting to hit to clear it from the PQ. That was a breeze. The next FTF in that same series was successful as well, and now that I knew what to look for, the rest should be easier too. On to the third attempt, but of a different series and hider. This was in a park with a few people engaging in practice for various sports. The first time was within view of the baseball and basketball facilities, and the basketball facilities were being used by a group of teens more interested in what others around them were up to than their game. As I was really the only other one there, they seemed intent to pay attention to what I was doing. So I busted there and on the other in that park, perhaps to come back a little later when more people could offer better cover. The next was a cache in that first series again, and a breeze to locate. The final attempt though I happened to pull into the closed business just as the building's owner was pulling in to show the building to someone. Argh! I chatted for a while and grabbed the business card to pass onto my boss, but being that its a restaurant and we're looking for an office...
Finally about 2:00PM I hit the road toward Port Huron where I'd planned to do some shooting. I kept the Oregon on the dashboard, zoomed out to show any new caches I might hit (we'd cleared out all the caches with easy access from the freeway last summer). Fortunately there were some so I jumped off a couple times to couple caches. I busted after spending about half-an-hour in search of a multi though in a park with six new hides. By the time I'd given up on that it was late enough that I had to abandon the search and head out to Port Huron. First stop was Marysville, and there happened to be cache on the dock of the first location I'd planned to shoot today. I loaded up the cameras and arrived at the location of the cache to find a couple amorous teens sitting on the cache. No worries -- I'll shoot some photos till they wander off. More than half-an-hour and they continued their activities without sign of moving or halting. Having run out of things to shoot, I ventured up to Desmond Landing, then to the Lightship Huron. Neither one of those had caches of course, but they both have good opportunities for photos. Oddly, both had wedding parties and their Photographers shooting there. The opportunities for interesting photos otherwise were low, so I packed up and drove a little further north to find all the beach parks overflowing in Fort Gratiot. Far enough -- I'll head home and work on the photos I shot and log the caches. But there are a couple more caches to hit on the route home! So all told I'd found nine caches and shot about 8GB of photos. Not much on either account, but it was after all a casual, easy going day for both.