Example for Grade 8: Narrative – Geocaching - ID: 5309

‘Geocaching.com’ I typed in this familiar web address on my smartphone and began searching the website for an intriguing find.
“That doesn’t stick out to me.” I mumbled to myself as I passed something with the title of, ‘Checkers Cache.’
I’m sure it wouldn’t be that bad, but still I wanted something better. I kept looking and looking until something did stand out, “Animal Cache!” I laughed to myself at the site of the name.
Surely I couldn’t pass something as ridiculous as that! Now that I knew what I would be looking for today, I inputted the coordinates of the cache I would be looking for and waited for it to tell my my route.
“Here I go.” I said as I followed the directions of my phone and quickly walked on the sidewalk.
Geocaching is my hobby and I’ve been doing it for almost as long as it’s been out, which has been since May of 2000. This activity involves going on an adventure and taking part in something that can be described as similar to a scavenger hunt. On a Geocaching adventure, one is searching for a hidden item in a secret location. The person who has hidden the object uploads it to the Geocaching website and the coordinates to it along with clues to its secret spot. If a person sees the cache information and is interested by it, they might input their coordinates to their GPS and follow the clues, so that they can look for the find. That is exactly what I am doing right now, which is using my GPS and clues to find a cache from the official website, as I found it worthwhile to look for.
“Could you watch where you are going!?” A woman with a toddler grabbing onto her arm, irritably remarked at me.
“Sorry.” I replied.
The lady walked in front of me and proceeded to step on my foot. I shook my head at her hypocrisy and couldn’t understand how she was going to get mad at me about something before proceeding to do the same thing. However, I didn’t dwell on my annoyance for too long, as according to my GPS, I was two minutes away from my destination. Around me, all there appeared to be were stores. None of them looked like they had anything to do with the ‘animal cache.’ I looked at my clues. One of them was ‘animals.’
“Of course, ” I mumbled with annoyance.
The other one was a bit more helpful, it said ‘the floor is green and it is an inviting place.’
“Thank you.” I laughed.
All I had to do was continue walking until my GPS told me I had made it. After about two minutes, I had reached a park. The park had vibrant green grass and most certainly looked like a welcoming place. There was only one problem, however, this was a huge park! It would probably take me at least an hour to search it, and that was if I was lucky. Once again, I looked at the ‘animal cache’ info to see if there were any more clues that I had missed earlier. There was not. This most definitely wasn’t the biggest place I had to search for a cache in, the margin of error on the GPS was usually only about five-fifteen meters, but the clues I had been given were not anything to rave about, and it was very cloudy, which made the GPS less accurate.
I sighed, “I guess I better start looking.”
After about twenty minutes, I realized something odd about the location of where I had been looking for the cache. This cache was called ‘animal cache’, yet there were no animals to be seen at this park. It wasn’t deserted, as there were kids, parents, and many other people, but I expected to see at least some dogs. The amount of people here was not that many, probably because of the weather I assumed, but I just found the lack of dogs really odd. About twenty feet away from me a sign with unreadable writing had been placed. There was a picture of a dog on it, so I decided to go towards it.
“What kind of park doesn’t allow dogs!” I exclaimed to myself. “Back to the starting point.”

I pondered for a minute where to look before settling on the row of stores that were across the street from the park. After exiting the park, I casually strolled on the sidewalk and crossed the street to the stores, hoping that my efforts weren’t worthless. None of the stores I looked at appeared as if they would help me with my mission much, as they had nothing to do with animals. That was until I got to the very last business on the street and practically ran up to the front door. This was probably it.
“Yes! Finally!” I swung open the front door and was hit by what I found to be an unmistakable sound, and beneath my feet, was a dark green floor.
“Hello.” An employee there greeted me. “Hello!” I greeted back.
“Mew! Mew!” A kitten cried.
At this point, I knew there was no way that the animal cache wasn’t hidden at this cat cafe. As I looked back at the door I entered, I knew that the sight of a small box was proof. In this box, I found, a familiar logbook, which I signed with my name and date. I also found an animal-themed notepad with a pencil with an eraser-top wedged in the spirals of it. It may have seemed like something small and invaluable, but to me and other geocachers it had value. I switched out one of the notepads with a pencil and in its place I put a cat key chain. I logged back onto Geocacher.com, and checked in that I had found the cache.