10 Clues, 2 Pens, and a Bottle of Wine

That sums up Sunday afternoon. My friend Brian and I headed out to do the "Tour of Grandview" cache - you'll notice the list says 'clues', 'pens', and 'bottle of wine'. The word 'cache' is not listed because we didn't find it. There are 10 clues to gather which give you coordinates to the next point, and we never got beyond step 3. Or really - beyond step 2. What tripped us up? Counting lamposts. I know - that sounds VERY easy, but it wasn't. We have no idea why. We just couldn't get an answer that seemed to fit.
I should have known things weren't going to be easy when we arrived at our parking coordinates and I didn't have a pen. I left my super-secret spy pen at home (that's a pen that looks like a tube of lipstick). Brian tried to scratch our answers for the first clue on a sheet of paper using a ... tire gauge, but as you can imagine that didn't work. It was pretty funny to watch, though. I regret not getting a picture of that! We tried to 'borrow' a pen from Stauf's, but they claimed not to have one. Maybe we looked suspicious? So we walked down to the Circle K, where there were all sorts of funky pretty pens we could have spent money on, but the cashier was nice enough to just give us a pen she had at the counter.
After a couple of hours of relentless searching, we decided we were thirsty and stopped in to Spagio's for a bottle of wine. Georesting with Geowine. We had a bottle of Chenin Blanc - I've never heard of it but it was the perfect sunny Sunday afternoon wine. We left, walked back down the street to continue our search - and then realized we had left our precious free pen there. So we go back. The hostess didn't really want to look for it, so she gave us a pen she pulled out of a container. This was our pen upgrade - it was waaayyyy better than the first cheap Circle K pen. Unfortunately, we had no further use for a pen as we really didn't find anymore clues, we just tried to redo the lampost count to no avail. From there we searched for a decorative brick building (seriously - that was the clue), but as our coordinates were off because of the stupid posts we were not successful. So that's it - we basically wandered around up and down Grandview Avenue for four hours, took pens from people, and drank wine. That's a pretty good geocaching day, wouldn't you say? We finally called it quits, ordered a pizza, opened a bottle of Black Rabbit Red that Francesca left for me, and watched Sideways.
I refuse to call this a failure and log this cache as 'not found'. We just haven't found it YET. We vowed to return on another day and get it right. This cache will not beat me. And for what it's worth - this was Brian's first cache (figures) but even though we didn't find it I think he caught the fever. I'll have to find a cool cache that we can do some time soon.