I guess people change
This is a short post, mostly for myself to remember this moment in time. In 2020, I was adamant that I would never get married. “Why would I want to do that?” I thought. “It’s just a piece of paper and a big party that costs a lot of money.” Maybe some tax benefits if you’re in the US, but in Hungary? Not so much.
Why would anyone do that?
Well, a single person can change a lot in terms of how you see the world, others, people. And I’ve found that person. So here we are, planning a wedding for 2027.
Cliché, of course, but true: words could never express what I feel when I look at her. It feels like the calmest I’ve ever been, that feeling when you can finally rest after a long journey.
This is the story of the unnecessarily elaborate proposal I pulled off. Because apparently, I can’t do anything simply.
The Plan
We love geocaching. A lot. We also love nature, secluded areas, and staying relatively private during important life events. So the plan was set: how could I combine all of these to create a memorable proposal?
Obviously, the ring was the first step, though it ended up being only a tiny fraction of my overall efforts. Because of course I had to overcomplicate things.
I needed:
- The ring
- Helper minions (yes, really)
- Geocaching items
- A perfect location
- A Plan B in case everything went horribly wrong
Geocaching
If you don’t know what geocaching is, please educate yourself, it’s wonderful. The issue was that I couldn’t just organize a hike around finding an already-placed cache and somehow sneak the ring in there beforehand. My balls aren’t that big.
Even hiding my own cache would be sketchy, leaving an engagement ring in the wilderness for an extended period seemed like a recipe for disaster. Publishing a new cache wasn’t an option either; it takes days to get approved, and random strangers could find it before the proposal.
After many workarounds, the solution emerged: create a completely fake cache. Everything would be set up to look real (I’m always the one checking the app when we’re looking for caches), and we’d release it publicly AFTER the proposal.
Then came the next problem: how would I set up a fake cache at the top of a mountain minutes or hours before we arrived?
I needed accomplices.
The Place
For the location, I was initially at a loss. I wanted something secluded, scenic, and on Hungarian land. Mountains here aren’t particularly high, so almost all peaks are covered with trees, not exactly panoramic proposal material.
Thankfully, I have a colleague who’s an ultra-runner and knows the mountains of Hungary like the back of his hand. He recommended Világos-hegy near Gyöngyöstarján, a nice peak with a good view in the Mátra Mountains. It’s also not very popular, meaning fewer random hikers to witness my nervous sweating.
Perfect.
The place was set. Now I needed to scout it. Small problem: my girlfriend tracks everything on Find My iPhone. So I planned a “scouting mission” during a department team-building Friday. I told her I’d be working at the office, left my phone at the department like a proper spy, and set out with my colleagues to find the perfect spot.
Thank you Máté, Zsolt, and Imi. You are the real MVPs.
We arrived, the place was awesome, the hiking was moderately easy, and we reached the top. Then I discovered a problem: a geocache had already been placed there by someone in 2004 (back when public GPS was barely available in Hungary). The issue? Officially, you need 200 meters between caches, and this one was exactly on the peak where I wanted to propose.
So I had to find a spot at least 200 meters away, which wasn’t easy on a small summit. Thankfully, on the opposite side of the peak, we found a suitable location that was far enough away for the real cache we’d publish later.
The final plan: set one fake cache on the peak itself (more scenic, we found a nice rocky spot that required some climbing) and hide the official, publishable items in the other location.
The Items
I searched far and wide for the perfect geocache supplies, a waterproof logbook, some cool toad and mushroom charms. The only good items I could find were on the official Geocaching website.
Thanks to… recent political developments… their shipping got limited to the US only. So I had to contact someone in America, have them order the items, and then ship everything separately to Hungary. It was a long process involving taxes, customs fees, and considerable headaches.
Thank you Vic for making this happen. I owe you a big one.
In the end, I found a padded official geocache with a waterproof logbook, plus a small mushroom and toad cache. I hid the toad and mushroom at the secondary location, and planned to place the big cache, with the ring, on the peak.
So how did the ring actually get there before we arrived?
The Day
I made up a fake plan to organize a hike with friends to Világos-hegy on a random Saturday. Due to a “paper deadline” (wink wink), they had to decline on the morning of the hike itself. This was the first time she got suspicious, according to her later confession.
In reality? My minions were already climbing up the mountain with the ring, GPS coordinates in hand, setting up everything for our arrival.
Perfect.
We traveled by public transport. Thanks to MÁV and Volán, it’s a complicated route, but after some struggle, we made it to Gyöngyöstarján. (Side note: the sakura trees of Gyöngyöstarján are amazing, we’ve fooled many people into thinking our photos were from Japan.)
It was a gloomy, cold, windy day. At the top, proposing the idea of finding a cache in fifty-kilometer-per-hour wind was… not that appealing. But I managed to be convincing. I pretended to be dumb and couldn’t find the cache myself, so she was the one to discover it.
The moment of realization was more shock than happiness, I had covered every aspect of this plan so thoroughly that she had absolutely no idea how the ring got up there, or how any of this had happened.
That was the moment she said: “Now you can really be fucking proud of yourself.”
After the proposal, we visited the geocache hidden in 2004. During the scouting mission, my minions had left cute messages for us in that logbook, so it was lovely to read them together.
We then visited the secondary location, found the toad and mushroom, set up the official cache, published it, and waited for approval.
The Cherry on Top
There’s that cliché about revisiting your proposal place every year. I thought that wasn’t ADHD-friendly enough, same place, every year? Boring.
So I came up with something better: a geocoin that would travel around the world. The goal? Instead of revisiting the actual proposal location, we’d track down wherever the geocoin ended up each year.
Oh, and the geocoin is a custom-ordered magical frog. Obviously.
This way, each year we have a different destination, thanks to the worldwide geocaching community. The adventure continues.
The cache and geocoin were approved within a week. They’re now live on geocaching.com:
- The Cache: Leapfrog and Toadstool (GCBD4XB)
- The Geocoin: The Traveling Leapfrog (TB8Y9M2)
Last known location of the geocoin: Szent István Bazilika, Budapest 🇭🇺
The Story Behind the Cache
For those curious, here’s the description we wrote for the geocache:
Once upon a time, the frog and the toadstool, guardians of the forest, decided to set out on a great journey together. The frog found safety beside the toadstool, while the toadstool discovered a companion without whom the world would have been far too silent. When the toadstool asked the frog to be its lifelong partner, the frog said yes, and so their adventure began. To this day, they still live side by side in the hollow of an abandoned tree, their story reminding every visitor that finding a true partner is life’s greatest treasure.
This cache symbolizes the beginning of our marriage, which started at the summit of Világos-hegy in the Mátra Mountains. We opened our journey with this cache, hidden at the place where our shared story began.
The traveling geocoin (TB8Y9M2) has its own mission: to explore the world, one cache at a time. Each year, we plan to track it down and visit wherever it’s ended up, so we can continue to be part of its adventure.
Conclusion
We finished the hike, went back home, and enjoyed a lovely dinner at a Bosnian restaurant in Budapest called Cevapivo. Highly recommended if you like Balkan food.
As it stands, the cache has already been found by fellow geocachers, and the geocoin is traveling the world.
I am endlessly grateful to everyone who helped make this happen:
- Máté Badó for recommending this summit. As a multiple finisher of the Vadrózsa 160, he knows the Mátra’s peaks better than the floor plan of his own home.
- Imre Molnár and Zsolt Csibi from the Department of Artificial Intelligence at ELTE for their help in scouting and placing the cache.
- Vic for the international shipping heroics.
- Many other friends and colleagues who kept the secret and supported me throughout this elaborate plan.
- And most importantly, her, for saying yes.
See you next year, wherever the little frog ends up! 🐸
