Step outside the frame: the America Arc does not necessarily have to be about America, does it? I have wanted to summarize this stage of my geocaching journey for ages, but life stayed busy. Now I have a workspace of my own—or procrastination space, depending on your definition. I cataloged the hunts I had joined, looking proudly at title after title in my bookmarks. Somehow I have played this many hunts in less than a year. I also prepared for CCBC 16, creating a dedicated workspace both to keep personal information out of recordings and to help myself focus. A little setup somehow produced forty-four pages. Absurd. At last, I can begin writing.

I introduced geocaching in Diary 93. As for how I began… the Puzzler’s Day write-up genuinely is underway, but it will not be finished soon. For the short version, visit GCB06GM Inverted Triangle and read the earliest log. That was my first cache.

Longtime followers know that this year, whenever I visit a place, I post a screenshot of its cache map. Sometimes I merely pass through and can only marvel at the quantity—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, I am looking at you. Big cities, sigh. Smaller cities are different: I can strive for 100% completion! So far, I have achieved it only in Zhanjiang. New hiders added several caches to Olympic Forest Park, and more appeared around Weihai after I left. Good work, Little Zhang. Still smaller places—Jiangshan, or… Xinjiang?—often have none. Then I consider placing one as I pass, followed by negotiations with reviewer Melos and solemn promises to maintain it. (Realistically, it will probably be left to survive in the wild.) But what about Hangzhou?

Hangzhou exists between “big city” and “small city.” Caches are not as common as cockroaches in a rented apartment, but not as rare as gacha gamers around me. (Are they rare at all?) To me, it felt like a place where full completion might be possible with enough effort. It was also where I grew up, where geocaching first caught me, and the final place I stayed before leaving the country.

Then let me do something with my time in Hangzhou.

I revisited Inverted Triangle in Yuhang and photographed my updated signature. My brother and I walked from Hefang Street to Wuliu Lane and signed a logsheet together. After an all-you-can-eat meal, Zhaobai and I climbed Baoshi Hill, found the cave cache, successfully transformed my white trousers into black ones, and placed a cache together at the Children’s Palace below. I met Nano, carried away two Trackables, and beat him by several hours to an FTF at Zhejiang Library. I claimed the FTF on the multi-cache at Zhijiang Bridge. I replaced the cache lost beneath Qiantang River Bridge during construction. And beside the Qiantang River, I hid six caches.

Experience from hiding in Zhanjiang let me quickly stock up on containers and magnets. I planned to imitate the three coastal hides there and place a new series along the Qiantang. Unfortunately, terminal laziness prevented every morning run. I delayed until the day before departure, then used David Guangxuan’s morning soccer practice to force myself outside. First I ran along the river to Qiantang River Bridge. (Why does that sentence make it sound easy?) After confirming again that the cache beneath it was gone, I added a replacement. Then I cycled onward, placing containers and recording GPS coordinates at every spot I had marked “worth a hide” on the way in. Somehow it took until noon. By the time I returned for soccer, everyone had just finished.

I submitted the caches from Malaysia. Naming them, writing descriptions, reserving consecutive codes, editing details, and correcting coordinates were all harder than expected. The first cache in the series sat too close to the final location of the multi beneath Qiantang River Bridge and failed review, so I had to ask a friend still in Hangzhou to move it.

I was very pleased with the final result. The “Zhejiang Provincial Greenway No. 1: Smart New World Section” gave all six caches a shared theme while leaving space to extend the series in either direction. Every hide was relatively simple but protected well enough that muggles would not casually remove it. I even placed a beginner’s guide on every logsheet, complete with my email address in case a child tried to eat one.

Thank you to Peter, a foreign player living in Hangzhou—GC name wizzletoff—for immediately taking every FTF except #1. He sacrificed a free promotional power bank along the way. Could those things be scams? In that case, he should thank me. Ahem. Thank you to Jenny for the late “playtesting” assistance, though apparently she still has not logged it; to lifanxi for moving #1 and recording its coordinates; and to Professor DeepSeek for writing the hide descriptions and matching wits with Melos. Alongside the earlier star at the Children’s Palace—a star marks a cache you own—six more stars appeared in a row on the map.

Even so, before leaving Hangzhou I never turned every cache on the map into a smiling face, the symbol of a find. But when the Children’s Palace cache became someone’s very first find, and when another person told me, “The Children’s Palace is part of my childhood too,” I stopped worrying about what I had gained from Hangzhou.

What matters is what you gave to someone else.