Go away, anchors! Bad anchors!

I'm planning a puzzle cache called Anchors Aweigh! So I checked to see how many geocaches have this name. The answer is 13. For fun, I checked to see how many geocaches have the name Anchors Away! The answer is 20. I decline to draw conclusions about geocachers from this. I will say that none of the Anchors Away! caches are in Minnesota. We're a smart bunch.

By the way, the cache is about ANCHORS in the context of a mathematical algorithm. Can you guess what it's about?

An embarrassment of riches in the way of geocaching social events lately: WeekNight caching in Ham Lake on Wednesday night, and Breakfast Buddies in Richfield this morning.

The highlight of the Ham Lake outing was the spectacular lunar eclipse overhead. It was also nice to hang out with topgear, Bus&Betty, and sir_zman. I hadn't met topgear before, but I had found some of his caches, so it was cool meeting him by accident at his own awesome puzzle cache ORIGAMI FLYING BIRD before the WeekNight. We all ended up at the Green Mill for dinner, but getting there was a trick. sir_zman gave me coordinates for the restaurant, but they took us both to an industrial park across the street from the complex that Green Mill is in. zman put his geo-sense to work, but I had to stop in at a Walgreens for directions before logging the dinner smiley.

Also, along the way to dinner I stopped off for a quick one, The Puck Stops Here!, another topgear cache as it turns out.

Two FTFs in the last couple days -- a poppa99 footbridge cache in Bordertown (nice meeting him at BB today), and a Bobcam puzzle cache, his first out of 85 hides. The Bobcam cache I DNFed last night with mini-bass, but I had solved the puzzle correctly. Bobcam had a little kink to work out of the puzzle (I've been there, I understand!), so I went out there again with Millah with the correct coordinates, and we still couldn't find it. A quick phone call to Bobcam produced the hint we needed, and one ripped Millah down coat later, we had our co-FTF. On to Richfield.

The Old Country Buffet was crawling with geocachers! I think the management was a little nervous, but they got our money, so it's all good. Who did I meet or talk to? I know I'll forget someone, but I'll give it a shot:

• Millah
  
• Pippin and Merry
  
• Bus&Betty
  
• topgear
  
• Bobcam
  
• knowschad
  
• sir_zman
  
• two of hearts
  
• Oneied Cooky
  
• TheCollector
  
• minnesotabrad
  
• Moe the Sleaze
  
• poppa99
  
• speedysk1
  
• RubberToes
  
• Red_Devil35
  
• Jonas
  
• GeoPierce
  

All these people to give pathtags to, and wouldn't you know it, I got a call from my wife a half-hour after the event to say that my pathtags had arrived in the mail. (Isn't it sweet that she recognized the importance of this fact?)

Congratulations to Millah on his 500th cache find -- Picture Sudoku -- which we picked up after the Breakfast Buddies event along with several others as we bumped into multiple cachers on the Traveling After Party Event Cache. We celebrated Millah's milestone with a Flat Earth Cygnus X-1 beer afterwards (we did not play Hemispheres [edit: Cygnus X-1 is on Farewell to Kings] by Rush, however). Millah gets Pathtag #1. Now, it's time to address some envelopes. Fifty pathtag trades to make good on. I turned off the trade button, but I'll be happy to trade with local cachers!