The Village of Arcade Park: A rainy day cache and dash.

Saturday had been one big smelly butt-licking washout.  All it seems to be doing this Spring is rain...rain...rain...rain...rain.  When it's not raining, it's drizzling.  Sometimes to mix it up it sprinkles, downpours, mists, showers, pours, storms and whatever other ways you can categorize non-stop-bloody precipitation!

You'll have to pardon me - I've spent far too much time watching it rain these last couple weeks.  Actually, I think at this rate, it will go down as being one of the wettest Springs in Western New York.  Eric no likey!  The continuous rain has been hampering my ability to get outside and enjoy the outdoors.  While I should head to the gym to get my buff on, I'd much rather prefer to enjoy a nice walk through the woods exploring the outdoors. 

I did get to enjoy being outside a little today.  Early this AM I spend a couple hours helping my Mom spread about 9 tons of gravel around the driveway and other spots in the yard.  It was decent exercise, and thankfully the weather held out for the majority of the festivities.  Sadly, the rest of the day was pretty wet and sloppy.  In the late afternoon//early evening I was sitting at home listening to the pitter-patter of rain drops when a brand-spanking-new cache hit my radar.

It was called Wild Spirit Boy Scout Cache by Nature Noggins and it was located right next door to me in the Arcade Village Park!  A few things excited me about this cache...unto which I will detail in numerical list form (dedicated to Jeff...haha):

1. It's not often a cache posts close to home,
2. Usually when a cache posts nearby...I'm no where near home!
3. The hides that have been popping up lately just have not been of a very high quality; and finally
4. This cache was a 50 cal. ammo can!

All reasons to take into consideration when evaluating my uber-doober level of excitement.  Hehe.  Arcade Park is a pretty spacious park, full of baseball fields and other open areas.  There's only two good areas to hide a cache here - and that is near the creek on the south side of the park, and the woods around the sledding hill on the eastern end.  In the past, a handful of caches have been placed in the park.  In chronological order of course:

• The Village of Arcade by Hucklebuckle (placed 9/2005)
• Szuchie's Walking Tour of Arcade by Szuchie (placed 11/2005)
• The Tree-mendous Tree Series Final by Nature Noggins (placed 2/2006)
• Village of Arcade Lives! by Hucklebuckle (placed 8/2006)

As you can see, there hasn't been a new cache placed in the park since 2006.  Of course several of these caches lingered for a few years, but ultimately Arcade Park has been cache-free since the Spring of 2009 (when the Tree Series Final faded into dust...saw dust that is...mwahahahahaha). 

Anyways...I was surprised to see a cache pop-up under a mile away from where I was sitting, so I decided to scope it out.  Ironically, I had just put my batteries in the charger in the event of some impromptu caching.  They were hovering just above "E", but I figured they held just enough juice to get me to the cache site.  With that, I loaded up my junk, and it was onward and upward to the Arcade Park!

Fortunate for me and my fading batteries, the cache was only about 500 feet from legitimate parking.  I made the short walk along side one of the baseball diamonds, and into the woods I plunged.  I had hiked here a few years ago, haphazardly scouting out it's potential as a cache hiding spot.  I never found anything that screamed out to me to place a cache here, and since I'm not a cache placer for the sake of cache placing, the area remained "uncached."  I had to tip-toe around a few pricker bushes and slide down a small muddy hill - but I was soon at my zero inspecting some likely spots for a cache.  A few spots looked ripe for an ammo can - only I discovered them to be barren of such treats!  Eventually I found the cache (in like the third place I looked...haha).  I signed in and rehid it good for the next group of eager beavers to find.

Up until this point, the rain had held off...but the sky looked as though it was ready to pour at any second.  I returned to my Suvie, and enjoyed some time in the park with my windows down and The Lowest of the Low rocking some tunes.  This brief respite from rain was exceptional...but eventually it started to sprinkle...building into a heavier more substantial rain.  So with that I packed up and returned home, to sit and glare unforgivingly at the falling drops outside!