Geodyssey 2

Lorrie LeBlanc

(aka lorriebird)

Lorrie is an amazing geocacher. She’s found over 25,000 caches, from trivial to impossible, from old to new, and from near to far. She’s found a cache in every county in Florida. She’s found a cache in every single US state twice. She’s gone all the way to the rain forest of Brazil for the last surviving Project A.P.E. geocache, one of the rarest and most difficult to find. She paddled two days (one way) in a kayak just to reach a virtual cache in the middle of the Everglades (and then two more days paddling back out). And, working together with antimony13, she was the first to find the final stage of my Puzzle Solving 101 series of geocaches.

I first met Lorrie while I was in one of my most productive periods of writing puzzles and embedding them in mystery caches, ca. 2007-2008. I learned a lot from her and others about the art of tailoring the puzzle to the solver. The challenging part for the constructor is to find the right balance between making it so easy that people don’t bother solving it, or making it so difficult that people give up trying to solve it.

As you can see in the photo at the top, Lorrie’s day job involves spending a lot of time in the cockpits of commercial aircraft. She had the good fortune to be flying the closest commercial aircraft at the time of the final launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavor … and, fortunately, she had her camera with her. Here’s one of the many incredible photos she took of the launch that day.

Final launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour
Final launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour

Solve the Puzzle

Click for Puzzle 8