Unexpected geocacher encounter

My wife's workplace hosted a wildflower hike in the Smoky Mountains today and the unexpected happened, I ran into another avid geocacher, Katarina (or Snövit her geocaching name). I've run into geocachers a few times before, but it is pretty uncommon. What made this encounter especially unusual was that the geocacher was also a scientist that had just attended a 3-day workshop with my wife at NiMBioS. We were waiting for hikers to show up at the NiMBioS parking lot and she overheard my wife talking about my geocaching adventures and immediately came over and said "you know geocaching?". I couldn't help but grin from ear to ear. Here was a colleague of my wife, visiting from across the sea, and she was a geocacher! Needless to say we hit it off pretty well. She had already found a geocache in Tennessee, but was shy about mentioning it around non geocachers so had not had a chance to go caching while here. The one cache she had found she had found on her own and was an urban micro near where she was staying. So when i told her there was a geocache out where we were hiking her eyes lit up and she firmly stated "we must go find it". That had been my plan all along. Except up until we met, my plan was to slink off away from the group and find the cache without drawing attention to myself. Now though, with another interested geocacher, I wouldn't have to be so timid and apologetic for fulfilling my geocaching urge.

The cache that we had to find was actually a virtual, since we were hiking in the Smoky Mountain Nation Park. Still, when we got close to GZ, I gave her my GPSr to let her do the honors of navigating us to the correct spot. The question to answer for the virtual was pretty darn easy. But even with the geocache found and no other caches to go after, we still continued to talk about geocaching throughout the hike. I guess that's just something that us cachers do. If she ever comes back to NiMBioS for another conference or workshop, I promised to take her geocaching for real. What a great treat to run into another geocacher unexpectedly! It's like we share a special bond, despite having never met one another before. 

Snövit near the GZ for the virtual cache