Thursday, October 27, 2005

The Politics of Caching - Part 1

This past weekend and week, I finally got around to hiding several of the caches that I'd been preparing for several weeks.
Unfortunately, not all of these have gone without incident. One of the simple ones in the base of a street light was called Guard Dogs. The name of this cache came from its proximity to the Ramada Inn on Hwy 84 in Woodway, TX. Just to the side of the front driveway of this location, the hotel has placed two small dog statues dressed in seasonal attire. Shortly after I noticed that the dogs had recently been re-dressed in Halloween shirts, I decided that this would be the perfect spot for a geocache and hid a small film canister cache in the base of this lamp post just several feet from the street.
During the first few days that this cache was hidden, several local cachers had a chance to successfully log this find and all made pleasant or humorous comments about the dog statues. That was until I suddenly got this email message from Rodger Fussell.
"I found a person snooping around my hotel. His excuse was 'he was geocaching'. NO ONE asked to use my property for any reason and that is a shame. If I catch anyone else, they will be given to the local authority along with a complaint. Who do you think you are that you can come on private property without permission. rcfussell"
Apparently, this email came as a result of a confrontation with a local cacher attempting to find this cache. "He lifted the skirt, pulled out the cache, and looked like he wanted to choke me and anyone else in the immediate vicinity. I encouraged him to open it up and read what was inside. He then informed me that I was on private property AND that the Texas he grew up in, he would SHOOT me for doing this."
Well, Mr. Fussell, I'm sorry that you feel this way. Rest assured that I will definitely advise EVERYONE I know including all of those geocachers from out-of-town looking for a place to stay to avoid your hotel. We certainly don't want the general public going on your hotel's property, do we?

1 comment:

M-T-P said...

Welcome, RF! I see that you've found this blog post from 6 years ago. Google searches are good for stuff like that.

Sorry to hear about your Ramada Inn closing down a few years ago - okay, not really.

I'm sure it wasn't because all the traveling geocachers (families, truck drivers, veterans, teachers, firefighters, software engineers, doctors, lawyers, and all sorts of other honest hard-working people) stopped visiting your "private property". I know when I've had out of town geocachers come to events in Waco that I've been involved with, I've taken them just up the road to the Fairfield Inn or sometimes even the little Extended Stay to honor your wishes.

Just for the record, I don't have any hard feelings. I just hope the new hotel owners won't threaten to SHOOT visitors standing at a lamppost near *their* hotel's driveway!

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