This Month:

• Who Wants to Get Lucky? By Elizabeth Slyter, aka CacheChasers
• North, to Alaska! By Becky Davis, aka beckerbuns

One day, I was home and there was a knock at the door. I opened it to a man wearing a sheriff's department sweatshirt...He asked me if I was lucky. I pondered the question for a moment and then answered, "well yes, I am lucky." It was then that his caching partner came around to the door and it became obvious to me that what he meant was "are you Lucky?" Who Wants to Get Lucky? was my own creation, inspired from the Choose Your Own Adventure children's book series. In the books, you read the introduction and at the end, it poses a choice of actions. The action you choose leads you to another part of the book and more of the story with more choices.

For the cache, I used the introduction of a grainy, black and white, movie-type private detective who has a woman come into his office late one night. Before she can say why she is there, she gets shot through the window. The cacher is then posed a choice; assist the woman or rush outside to catch the shooter. Each choice has its own coordinates and at each set of coordinates you will find a micro (usually an Altoids strips container) that will pose more choices, or perhaps a dead end.

While writing "Lucky", I was feeling particularly evil and made some of the dead ends several micros deep. The cacher could spend several hours looking for one stage, only to discover that they made the wrong choice three moves back.

One of the micros is attached to a fire hydrant in our front yard. It's fun to watch people try to be sly so close to a house. What is even funnier is that I, along with anyone else who has already solved the case know, that it is part of a deep dead end.

One day, I was home and there was a knock at the door. I opened it to a man wearing a sheriff's department sweatshirt. I was expecting a police officer to drop by and talk to me about a local problem so I assumed this was him. He asked me if I was lucky. I pondered the question for a moment and then answered, "well yes, I am lucky." It was then that his caching partner came around to the door and it became obvious to me that what he meant was "are you Lucky?" They had gotten stuck trying to find a micro down in the story, so, being bright people, they retraced their steps to the spot where they thought they were most likely to get help on the fly. I gave them some hints on where to find the micro and sent them on their way.

Friends of ours were trying Lucky early on and called to say they couldn't find a micro. This particular micro was in the same park where we had hidden two of the micros, but in totally different legs of the story. I told him where it would be but then while I was running errands later, I stopped by to check on it. Sure enough, he and his wife pulled up to investigate the other leg of Lucky.

Actually, almost all of the 17 micros needed to maintain Lucky are hidden on my errands route. We've spoken to some cachers when they stopped by the hydrant micro;My favorite Lucky story though came from a friend of ours who smokes a pipe. they had, no doubt, thought that we were stalking them since, later in the day, we ran into them three or four more times.

One cacher was trying to look sly by a bank of pay telephones, while not attracting the attention of a nearby transient. He checked the coin return, just in case, and found a coin. He definitely had the transient's attention now, so he passed along the coin. He checked the next phone and found another coin, which he also passed off. By now, he had realized he was in the wrong spot for the micro but before he could move on, he was approached by another transient who saw our cacher's generosity and asked for more change. The cacher got out of there in one piece, but a few dollars lighter.

My favorite Lucky story though came from a friend of ours who smokes a pipe. He was out one day, chasing down Lucky, and was pausing near one of the micros that seemed to him to be a dead end. He was then approached by a scruffy looking fellow who told the cacher that he was too young to smoke a pipe. Our friend was taken aback and explained to the fellow that he was 49 years old. The stranger replied, "four plus nine is 13, that's too young." He then stomped off. After he left, our friend was pondering the strangeness of the conversation when it dawned on him that this might be a part of the story; that we had somehow contracted a guy to stand on that corner and give people numeric clues. Our friend had to call us before he did anything else to make sure that he wasn't supposed to be doing anything with those numbers.

Sadly, maintaining Lucky is a bigger job then I have time for, so in early August, we are taking all the Lucky micros down. We will replace them with a less complicated adventure along the same lines. If you ever find yourself in Vancouver, Washington, give it a try.