So it's 11:45 PM in the bushes on a clear moonlit night, I've found the cache and I'm rummaging through my pack looking for the camera tripod (I swear it takes longer to set up and document the find than it does to actually look for it these days) when suddenly out on the path, there's movement.

Off goes my flashlight, it's a geo-muggle most likely, and with that a decision to be made: Is it easier to sit here and hide out while they pass by or try and explain the whole thing (again)? I pull the cape around my stuff and drape one arm over my lower face and just sit there, crouched. There are easier things to explain than the particulars of why you're out in the bushes with a pile of tech dressed in a Batman costume.

The whole caching with the suit thing was supposed to be a lead-up to a Halloween prank in 2002 where I was going to hit some caches at night with the mask, under a sock puppet account, and then challenge local cachers to discover my true identity, later incorporating it into a cache somehow.

I went to pick a mask (I have a collection), and the batman one seemed to fit the bill. I was wearing a black Ottawa Senators practice jersey at the time so that worked. I couldn't find the cape that first time though, it had been packed away for years (doh!).

So I did the cache (Puma Head Cache), but at the last minute I scrapped all that secret identity stuff and posted under my main account. I started getting emails from people so I did it a bit more. Then it became expected.

Now I have no choice. People seem to get a kick out of it; some poke good-natured fun at it in their logs. A friend of mine even made The Batcacher TB, (which has way better abs than me).

Little kids really get into it. At one geocaching event, after the suit came out, there were these kids who came up to me to ask about the bat cacher. I played dumb for 15 minutes insisting that I don't know whom he is or why he seems to show up when I log caches (I don't think they bought it).

I try to upload photos on all of my logs so the bat suit is really fun in that respect. There's something about the suit that makes it look good anywhere, on the top of a mountain, in a water fall, in snow, and it especially photographs well at night. I've worn it on some hydro caches in this yellow dingy I have and it looks funny there (the canoe campers in Frontenac park didn't know what to make of that one).

People ask if I wear the suit while looking for the cache. That's a secret, but you can't really see out of the thing (I learned this early on in 1989 when I first bought it for a Halloween party and tried to drive with it).

When I first started the solo night caching because it fit in with my schedule really well, there were some safety concerns. I'm always amazed at the great number of non-caching persons there seems to be out there in the middle of the night. At least geocachers have a reason to be there. What these other people are doing, I have no idea. I've seen some coming out of the woods with shovels (maybe I don't want to know).

Which leads to the other thing about the get-up. If it freaks people out, it's probably a good defense mechanism. I probably wouldn't want to run into someone with a getup like that, in the woods at night. Several times I've been doing caches at night and almost run into people while wearing the suit, and every time I kinda hunker down and it's so dark they just pass on by without knowing.

I do get the urge to jump up and bellow some super-hero type thing every time though, but that would just freak people out. The closest I came to doing just that was when I was crouched in the woods with a cache setting up for a photo and a small group of teens passed by the nearby path obviously on their way to a bush party. All I heard were clinking beer bottles and semi-drunken laughter. They had seen my flash go off from a distance and they all stopped, as did I. It would have been pretty funny.

They thought it was friends trying to scare them and continued on. They could have had a funny "Batman took our beer" story (they were underage.. or they could have beaten the crap out of me, I can't see very well in that thing). Lately I've been doing the night caching with other caching buddies as it makes it a bit safer.

The police don't seem to get a kick out of the bat suit. The police thing I find really odd, because the classic Batman character although a vigilante, is a crime-fighter. I was coming back from a no-find on a very hard cache once that took me up the side of a mountain at 2:00am in a snowstorm ( The Missing Piece ). When I got back to my car I plunked my bag down in the passenger seat and started rummaging around for a bottle of water, strewing my things all over the passenger side of the vehicle in the process.

About 20 minutes later on the highway I hit a police checkpoint doing the RIDE program (A random stoppage looking for drunk drivers). I rolled down my window and the officer played his flashlight around the interior, saw the bat-cowl, the cape, the bullwhip, the flashlight (bigger than the one he was using) and he pulled me over to the side to ask me several questions about the contents of my bag at which time he asked me not to disturb.

After about 10 minutes the two police officers figured that I couldn't possibly be making this stuff up ("I'm also a member of the Australian Plaiter's guild officer, you can check on their website too.") and they let me continue on my way. Now I make a point of keeping my stuff in the trunk.

I used to work in a theatre a long time ago and we had this guy we called "Joe Ninja man.” He was this homeless person who would wear a black Karate gi and a rising sun headband and do kata's in the parking lot at midnight while I was changing the marquee sign. He would always come up to me and say, "Is everything alright? Routine security check!" and he'd go off and do the same service someplace else. So if I ever get caught in the woods in full costume by the fine folks in law enforcement, I'll just say "I'm fighting crime, what does it look like?" So maybe that other guy wasn't so crazy after all.

So where was I, oh yeah, crouched in the woods. It seems most law-abiding non-homeless muggles always have good reasons to be out in the woods at midnight. They're walking their (usually large) dogs. Dogs have this great sense of smell; I've heard of one that's been trained to sniff out Tupperware, but on this night, it catches my scent. Looks like I have some explaining to do (I'll work on my "Woof Woof" just-another-dog-go-away sometime).