I was anxious to get going so I quickly selected three geocaches that were closest to the hotel — Forum’s Revival, Coliseum, and Circus Maximus — downloaded the latitudes and longitudes into the Magellan eXplorist GPS and hit the street. It would have been much better if I had done some better planning, reviewed the logs of others who had found the caches, and selected caches that had maximum odds of me finding them. As they say, haste makes waste.
No map in hand, I headed down the Via Veneto toward the Forum following the arrow on the GPS. I was so confident there would be plenty of time that I stopped along the way at a small sidewalk cafe called Berzitello’s and enjoyed a plate of spaghetti. From there I meandered from street to street following the arrow until I reached the Forum. The IBM Business Leadership Forum focused on "Innovation that Matters". The Roman Forum obvioiusly focused on innovative structures — especially impressive considering that many of them are nearly two thousand years old. It is a marvel that they were constructed.
After taking a few false entries I finally got to the spot — or so said the GPS. There were a number of logical hiding places within twenty feet of the waypoint and I searched many of them. After more than a half-hour I gave up and headed for the Coliseum. At least I would find the other two caches. The Coliseum is an enormous place and there were thousands of people touring the ruins. The eXplorist said the cache was just 300 feet away. Sounds simple, but with the huge circumference and multiple levels of the Coliseum, it was not at all clear where the cache might be. If you are an experienced geocacher, you know what I mean. Sometimes you are a few hundred feet away but there is a river with no bridge in between. After an unplanned tour of most of the Coliseum, I found the spot, but not the cache. The latitude/longitude) was near a meadow and a wall just a couple of hundred feet from the main entrance to the Coliseum. After a half hour, I reluctantly gave up. Sound familiar? Well, at least I will find one of the three. Off to walk to the Circus Maximus.
This one should be easy, I told myself. Out in the open, nothing tricky about it. I got to the exact spot and searched high and low. Empty handed again. The good news is that I logged quite a few miles of walking on a sunny day. The weather was perfect. After meandering through the streets of Rome back to the Via Veneto and the hotel, I went straight to geocaching.com and read the logs of people who had found (or attempted to find) the three caches. If only I had done that *before* the search. It was tempting to head out again but the day was late and the miles of walking were enough — and I had a plan for the morning.
Since I knew exactly where to go I knew I could hire a taxi for an hour, get to all three cache locations, and still get back in time for the opening of the Business Leadership Forum. Forum’s Revival was still no piece of cake but I was able to find it in less than ten minutes. I signed the logbook, removed a travel bug, hid the tupperware container back in it’s place, and headed back to the taxi. At the Coliseum, I went to the exact same spot as the afternoon before and recognized all the clues from the logs — but still could not find it — a big dissappointment. On to Circus Maximus to look for the microcache. Traditional caches are in tupperware containers or ammo cans. Microcaches are much harder to find — they are usually black 35mm film containers — easy to hide in a very small place, in this case in a three-foot high wall behind a loose stone. With two out of three finds, I declared victory, headed for the hotel, put on a tie and took a shuttle to the Auditorium Parco della Musica where Sam Palmisano kicked off the day.
As usual, I apologize for being a poor photographer, but I do have quite a few pictures to share in the photo gallery.