Our bags are packed with winter-like clothes (it snowed today at Mt Rushmore) and more electronics than an F-14 fighter plane.
What started as a two week vacation in the American west to eyeball some of the great natural wonders it has to offer, has somehow morphed into a long distance cache hunt. Now instead of gazing in awe at Devils Tower or Monument valley I will be staring at the GPSr while peeking at the ground looking for ammo cans well integrated into the environment.
The Emperor got a bath today even though he will need another one in three weeks after sitting in long term parking.
I finally got around to watching the T:TSCC from Friday night yesterday evening and bang, pow a main character dies. Derek Reese, John Conner’s uncle, takes a bullet to the brain from a terminator during a small skirmish in a house. It happened in a random sort of way that might occur in a real shootout, seemed real.
An hour or so later while watching this week’s episode of House when holy crap, a main character dies. Dr. Lawrence Kutner takes a bullet in the brain from himself. Maybe because this occurred off-screen it didn’t seem as real as the T:TSCC one. I liked Kutner the best of the 3 new fellows on the show, but that is not saying much as I never really warmed up to any of them. I probably won’t miss him as much as the Derek.
I’m almost afraid to watch last Friday’s Dollhouse in case within the first 15 minute a major character dies.
The most surprising thing is that I didn’t recognize Meatloaf as the actor playing the male patient on the episode of House.
I took the caliper bracket that had the frozen slider pin in to work. An engineer there just knew it would be simple to fix. He toyed with it for awhile without success before giving it to the tool room for them to try. They turned a torch to it while hammering madly. It got so violent their supervisor told them to stop. A day later the engineer went back, put the bracket in a vice, clamped down on the hex head with a 12″ monkey wrench and twisted, the pin loosened and was removed. I tossed out the slider pin, but couldn’t bring myself to throw out the bracket for two reasons; 1) that sucker was expensive and 2) turns out it is ambidextrous – fits both driver & passenger sides. Bead blasting made it clean & shiny and I have found a new use for it.
Guess what we did today? Right. Geocaching. Not once, but twice.
We headed out early on the tandem to pay bills and catch a few caches. Our first stop was dropping off the cable bill and from there we hustled across the southside to a church where there was a regular size tupperware that held a travel bug. We beat everybody, even the preacher, to the parking lot. The advertised TB was’t inside, but one of the missing ones from yesterday was, so we took it. Logged our find and headed over to the complex of office buildings nearby.
We were there for one of four postal themed caches we had earmarked for the ride. The four are small to micro sized containers near blue USPS mail drop boxes. This first one was hid in some bushes and the hint mentioned “The bushes are very sticky.” My index finger on the right hand is still a little tender where a holly leave punctured it. And we didn’t find the cache.
Next we went a little way down the road to a box in a shopping center parking lot. I spotted this one quickly. It was a bison tube inside a small replica of a blue mail drop box. As we signed the log we noticed that there was a car at a bank ATM that was sitting there the whole time and the passenger kept glancing our way, it was a regular “mutual wonder what the heck are they are doing society.”
Next one was down a hill through a country club to a medical plaza and blue box. This one was in the bushes and it consisted of mini replica of a home mail box. Signed the log and thought we were smart in avoiding a very steep hill back up by going a different way, but it turned out to be a much longer and tougher climb.
The last of the series was another bison tube with a trickier hide. After rolling the log sheet back up and stuffing it back in the tube we opted to head home and get breakfast. The 4.3 miles walking on Friday, 4.7 on Saturday and 9 miles on the bike today was starting to take its toll, we could go out later to pay the 2 remaining bills (by car.)
The Birthday Bug we grabbed at our first cache of the day was bigger than we wanted to take out west and it listed a bunch of nearby places it wanted to visit, so after lunch we headed for an ammo can over in North Augusta. But before we went there Donna thought we ought to swing by our one miss of the morning. Because we had done the other three of the postal series, we now thought we had a pretty good idea of what we were looking for. Sure enough Donna spotted the small home mail box replica standing up while I was back on my hands and knees looking under holy bushes. The ammo can was an easy find, because the hint gave pretty much gave it away and we picked up an unexpected geocoin to add to our bounty.
We now have 9 travelers to take on our vacation, but we think that we might drop one in Columbia somewhere on Friday and then a second one in Charlotte on Saturday before catching a plane to lighten our load.
We collected two travel bugs yesterday so we could take them out west with us next week. Today we thought we’d snag a few more.
There were two TBs in a close by cache we had already visited, so it would be a quick park and grab. Unfortunately neither of them were in the container. On the bright side, there was a traveling item in there, that was a recent drop (after I had last checked the cache status.)
There was a second cache at the library that had the same parameters, 2 TBs and we had visited it before too. Like the first stop, neither of the listed items were present in the cache. Unlike the first one though, this one didn’t have a bonus bug.
We had one more spot we had been before and this one had three travelers including one whose goal was to make it back to Arizona which was right up our alley. But, what had now become a trend, there were no TBs in the ammo can here either.
After this we headed into Hitchcock Woods to watch the annual Horse Show and visit a couple caches. One of them, Cuthbert Cache had two Travel Bugs, but this cache had proved elusive two weeks ago on two tries, once on our way into the woods and again on the way out. This time we beat the bushes for around 15 minutes in frustration, we even checked on the wrong side of the trail from where the clue said it should be, just because one time the the GPS needle twitched that way. We both wanted to call it quits and took two steps away before I turned around to make one more pass. I found it! Hot diggity! Now looking at where it was hid, I can’t believe we missed it for so long.
The second one in the woods also had two travelers and we had found it before. This one, Up Sand Creek, at least had one of the two advertised TBs, so we pocketed it on our way back out of the woods.
With our success with the Cuthbert Cache on our third try, we decided to make a quick detour to make a third pass on Horsey Place. Once again the third time was a charm. As a nice surprise, there was a Travel Bug for our taking.
After a second consecutive more than 4 mile walking day we called it quits for the day and headed home for showers, a late lunch and some TV watching. That lasted almost 6 hours before we started planning caches to find tomorrow morning,we plan on biking into town to pay bills. One thing led to another and we spotted one that had a couple travel bugs (we hoped), but is was part of a trio in a park that wasn’t conducive to grabbing by bicycle.
So, that’s right, we went back out in the car and ended up walking around a mile tracking these caches down. First stop was an ammo can with the travel bugs and it went pretty smoothly except we were on the wrong side of a chain link fence. We both hopped it (that was a lot harder to do than we remembered, seeing as the last time we probably hopped a fence was 25 years ago.) At least both bugs were in the can, so they could be added to our collection. Cache #2, A Cut Above the Rest, was a micro and the GPS led us to the likely spot, but we weren’t having much luck until Donna read the title out loud for the third time and she realized we needed to look up. Bingo! The third cache was a two stage multi with two micros. We found the first part in short order and that gave us to coordinates for the second part. That lead us across a big open field into the opposite tree line. Ground Zero looked like a neighborhood trash dump in which neither one of us felt comfortable poking around in. We gave up looking for the camoe film canister in short order. I emailed the cache owner for a hint, we’ll see what happens.
…if you were an ammo can.
We had the afternoon off and needed to go to south Augusta to look for some work shoes for Donna. While we were over that way I picked out several geocaches to find in and around Phinizy Swamp. One was a micro, one was a small log only, one was an earthcache and another was a medium sized lock-n-lock and 4 were regular sized ammo cans. We found all the caches but one and that one wasn’t even a DNF. The trail leading to it had about a 10′ stretch that was underwater and we didn’t want to wade through it, so we never got closer than 200′.
The last one gave us the most trouble, but I think that was because we were tired. We had been at this for 3 hours or so and had already walked over 4 miles. Both Donna and I probably circled the thing once or twice and it was only after we stopped looking and decided to leave that I spotted it.