Downtown LA - Park Street -- UPDATE: FOUND

CODE: GCQFJF
COORDINATES: N 44° 05.841 W 070° 12.989
HINT: It is within 5 or 6 feet of a permanent 15 minute parking sign.
CACHE SIZE: Micro
DIFFICULTY: 4
TERRAIN: 1
FIND #: 2

went with my co-worker miranda on our morning stretch break. we work less than a block away at sun journal and every morning and afternoon a nice lady comes over the intercom letting us know that it is time for our morning/afternoon stretch. we try to take advantage of these with walking around a few blocks. however today we used our stretch break for a little neighborhood geocaching...


this was the second cache i went to find, or should i say attempted to find. we were equipped with a google maps street view and miranda's droid that was downloading a program for entering in long/lat coordinates (which only started working after we gave up and went back to work). needless to say we didn't find it.

looked in the sewers to see if something was tied to the grates hanging down into the abyss below. looked up in the near by tree, saw a bunch of leaves and a birds nest. wanted to inspect the 15 min parking spot a bit more but didn't want to look like i was trying to break into the little old lady's car that was parked there. was half tempted to open up the mcdonalds chicken nugget box on the side of the road but figured that it wouldn't be in something that could so easily be thrown out. examined the "15 minute parking sign" as if i was a doctor giving it a physical. saw a beer can crunched up and shoved into the sewer grate, thought maybe, but how would you get it out w/o it falling in?? no luck.

here were some of the "hints" we got from reading the log on geocaching.com:
• no need to tear anything up. it's there. the container is smaller than a film canister.
• talk about TINY, we took a pic of the cache next to a nickel
• it was the recovery of the cache which gave us fits.
• i was right on top of it before without even knowing it!
• there is nice stone landscaping around a nearby tree. the cache is not there and there is no need to lift up or dig up any of the rocks.
• you don't have to disturb anything for this very clever hide.
• this cache is one of a kind.
• the shadow tipped me off to the cache.
• this was perhaps the coolest I have found to date. very nicely put in a location most passersby wouldn't think of looking.
• please read the clues carefully, there is only one place it can be.
• bringing little hands sure helped on this one

my thought is that is may actually be in the beer can, or maybe in a crack in the granite curb... we will check back on our afternoon stretch break. until then...

UPDATE 1:59 PM -- FOUND
miranda and i went back on our afternoon stretch break, okay a few minutes before... this time equipped with more log reading and a gps that worked. we let it settle then walked to where the gps said the coordinates were and let it settle again. there was only one place for it to be, after looking for a few minutes i spotted it! and pulled out the tiny capsule.

it's downtown lewiston, and there are some real shady people in the area, and its probably one of the only place where suspicious looking geocachers look like they actually fit in (as prostitutes, drug dealers/addicts, or petty thieves). this said we tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, we even saved the excitement of finding it and the hi-five until we were back in the safety of our office.

this was a great find, what a creative place to hide it, miranda and i talked on the way back of how the person hiding it actually got it in there! amazing!