Geocached Stashes!

Someone recently posted an interesting comment on the idea of the Tontine - he suggested we consider 'geocaching' our treasured panties and lingerie.

The idea is to hide your stash in a buried weather/waterproof container and mark it's location coordinates using a GPS. Then if you go missing, a trusted friend (the 'shovel friend' another called him) who you've given the geocached information to can dig it up and in this case, the friend wins possession of your stash.

That is a solution... and it's certainly a bit extreme. But it's a creative, high tech variant of what many of us have done for years when we hide our stashes.

But frankly it's not much different from what I did when I was in grade school and needed to hide my precious Penney's & Sears catalog pages and the one pair of nylon briefs I'd snatched from a wash line, is it?

I had no place in my parents apartment to hide my secret stuff, so my solution was to wrap them in multiple layers of waxed paper and then put them into a tin can with a tightly fitting lid... which I then wrapped in layers and layers of black electrical tape. Not exactly high tech, but for the time (mid-fifties before plastic bags were part of our world) it was all this frantic boy could come up with.

The package was then buried on the side of a remote hill (to limit water seeping) and the spot marked with stones and a small stick from a nearby tree. I'd been in scouting, so I knew how to triangulate the spot using landmarks so I could find it. So much for elaborate GPS technology! But I didn't have to fear an embarrassing grilling from my mother, who I knew would have found my stash if I tried to hide it in our small, crowded apartment.

The downside to that solution and it's high tech geocached brother, is how difficult it is to gain access to the stash when we absolutely need to see and touch that precious stuff. And we ALL need to do that don't we?

Bill Turlock of LLAPA has a wonderful (true) story of the ultimate in buried stashes http://www.llapa.com/tontine.html . This piece was the origination of my thoughts about creating some sort of Tontine... many of you will find it interesting - most of you should find the magnitude of the stash astonishing!

I remember sneaking over to my stash's hiding place every few days, and digging it out... all the while nervously looking over my shoulder to see if someone was watching. I could not be content knowing they were safely stored away... I needed to enjoy those panty pictures (the porn of the 50's) and the neighbor girl's panties. But after opening that container many times, the tape lost much of it's stickyness, and ultimately my stash ended up a nasty, mildewed mess. So much for home grown storage solutions!

But this sort of plan seems appropriate for emergency situations - like the one I went through recently with my friend "P". He feared his wife had figured out where his stash was hidden and he was away from home on a trip. I was able to swoop down and move his (huge) stash, and as a result all is well on the homefront today. I would not however have been able to dig enough holes to geocach "P's" enormous stash in the ground, so he and I settled on a more conventional strategy - I moved it to another public storage unit.

I'm glad that we are putting ideas on the table. This is a good start - it means we're thinking about how we can sanely move our collections safely on to their next owner. I invite you to post more thoughts ... for the more ideas we can collect here, the more likely we will be to find creative definitions for what this Panty Tontine ought to be.
Cheers!