weaselmom | Entries tagged with geocaching

Disclaimer: I think I'm coming down with something, and my brain is filled with kapok. So this will be much more disjointed and much less entertaining than it would have been had I posted yesterday. ( In which we run hither and yon. )

Hmm. It was still a really good day, just bittersweet in some ways. In stark contrast with all that running around, today I got up at noon and am still in my jammies. There's never a good time to get sick, but we're super-busy at work right now and I need all the brain cells I can get.

And what did you do with your weekend?

I'm pretty far behind in updating. The last few weeks at work have been just wretched, and as usual the thought of doing one more thing that felt like an obligation, such as updating, made me want to burst into tears. Unfortunately, things aren't going to calm down for at least another week or so, and even then it will probably be some completely other irritating thing. I guess that's why they call it "work." But it hasn't been all bad. Not last week but the week before I cooked some more stuff, specifically sweet 'n' sour glazed chicken breasts and mandarin orange pork medallions (not at the same time, doy). And broccoli, because there's always time for broccoli. The chicken was pretty good, with the usual issue of the glaze (thick and sticky, I swear to you!) droobling off the chicken during cooking. The pork medallions were good too; the recipe called for 1 teaspoon of prepared horseradish, but I don't know why, because you couldn't taste it at all! Shawn said maybe it didn't matter if you could taste it or not, that it may have added a certain oh, I don't know, je ne sais quoi. Kij has promised me that we'll have a salmon-cooking date at some point, and I'm really looking forward to that.

( In which I blither at some length about rhododendrons... )

( Charmed, I'm sure! )

( Geocaching Kirkland! )

So, yeah, five days of hell at work next week, then helping K move, then our friend Bryan's wedding Sunday, then five more days of hell at work, then Memorial Day weekend, then four more days of hell at work, and then vacation (to be spent with S's family in San Diego). Are we having fun yet?

We actually achieved bacon this morning! AND eggs! It was a bit of an uphill battle during which we again proved the old adage that partners should never try to teach each other how to do something. We usually end up having a frank exchange of opinions in which Things Are Said and Later Retracted. Actually, S ended up cooking the bacon because I was fully occupied with the whole scrambled eggs and diced red peppers thing. I did try to watch what he did for next time, but it seems to me that cooking bacon falls under that heading of "men grill the meat." Everything turned out just fine, but good grief, what a mess! Will somebody please remind me why I'm purchasing ingredients and dirtying half the dishes in the house and squabbling with S when I could just throw on some clothes and drive to Shari's or Denny's?

( Tonight, in which we revisit Two Mustard Chicken and make an alarming discovery about asparagus. )

( Still geocaching. )

What have you all been up to?

Last weekend S and I went to Leavenworth on Sunday and Monday to do a little geocaching and just get away for a bit. (For those who don't know, Leavenworth is a wonderful, if kitschy, little town that has completely remade itself as a Bavarianish Village. It's about 120 miles northeast of Seattle. I'm not sure how long it takes to get there because we've never done it without making a bunch of stops.) This was also supposed to be our annual foliage drive to go check out the fall colors. We had wanted to go a few weeks earlier for prime color but just couldn't make it happen. I won't pretend that our color is as impressive as New England's, but it's still gorgeously flaming and golden at the right time. Fall is a busy time for the town, what with the Autumn Leaf Festival and a couple of weekends of Oktoberfest. Our trip fell on a rare quiet weekend, as the town catches its breath before gearing up for Christkindlmarkt at Thanksgiving and then the Lighting Festivals in December. We got the lodgings we wanted and had plenty of elbow room while wandering around the shops.

( The rest of the trip... )

18: Number of caches on our list for Saturday.

15: Number of caches actually found.

1: Number of caches put off for another day on account of not wanting to be stuck near UW when the game let out.

2: Number of DNFs. We think they are actually missing, not just that we couldn't find them.

14: Number of caches found by Weaseldad.

1.5: Number of caches found by Weaselmom, who was having a day of astonishing woolly-headedness, partly because of this stupid cold. The .5 cache was because Weaseldad was practically pointing at it for me. The 1 was found by the simple expedient of kicking a fern and hearing a "clonk."

15: Number of minutes it took us to find a 1/1 that was supposed to be one of the world's easiest caches. *That's* the kind of day I was having.

1: Number of squirrels hand-fed almonds at Ravenna.

3: Total number of squirrels fed, even if the others weren't brave enough to take from my hand.

69: Temperature it was supposed to be according to the weatherguessers (and sunny).

59: Actual temperature (and cloudy).

2500: Number of calories consumed (each) at dinner at Dan's restaurant.

91: Total number of caches found so far.

Dudes, I am BEAT. We were out around Exit 32, which is Cedar Falls/North Bend. We hit 12 of the 19 caches on our list today thanks to getting an early (well, earlier than usual!) start. What happened to the others? Well, we dropped three of them because they would have taken as long as the other 16 combined: a bunch of 3.5 terrain up a hellish piece of real estate called Rattlesnake Ridge. I don't think I'm ready for that kind of climb and will have to wait and try it next season. On two others we just couldn't find the right starting point and decided not to waste any more time, and the last two we just plain ran out of daylight and decided to save for another day. I won't bore you comatose with descriptions of them all, but they were varying levels of terrain and hunt difficulties. ( Thus and so... )

Today we headed southwest with our primary focus on Dash Point State Park. Now, for purely selfish reasons, I'm glad the state repealed the $5 parking fee for state parks, but I do worry about where the money will come from to help maintain the facilities. Maybe I should send the Parks Department a Christmas card with a couple of Benjamins tucked inside. Anyway, guilty conscience notwithstanding, we spent a couple of hours snorking up the five GCs within the park proper. ( Yes! Five! )

Hope you all had a nice weekend too.

Well well welly-well! After a day schlepping around Green Lake, which in this heat was essentially the Bataan Death March with squirrels, we managed to hit our 50th cache! A milestone like this calls for a special celebration, something like breaking a blister in your new hiking socks. So, lone remaining reader, do you care? I'm really too beat to give the full run-down, but I will say that we did some caching Saturday in the Arboretum when it was even hotter. I found one by myself, S found one while I tried not to pass out from the heat, and later that night our own beloved

woadwarrior found one *in the dark* by the simple expedient of blindly sticking his hand into a hole, just as his Viking forebears did when they cached a thousand years ago. Today we put about four miles on the old shoe leather and ended up with two DNF out of, what, nine caches today total? I forget. It all blurs together, but I did find one by myself, and Shawn was just brilliant all day. Anyway, 50! Who'd a thunk it? And even though sometimes we squabble like dingoes over a baby, even though we still have bad moments like today when we discovered I left the swag bag at home and thus we couldn't pick up any trinkets, we're sticking with it for the time being. We have to--Shawn's new hiking boots aren't even paid off yet.

I now hold in my grubby fist a real, honest-to-God Jeep travel bug!!! There is a long, long story behind it, but the short version is that Shawn tracked it down through a backdoor. Its previous hider hadn't logged the drop in the usual way and in fact had erroneously specified the wrong cache for his drop, which is why perhaps nobody else even knew it was there. S took off from work a little early, came home and hopped on his motorcycle, and shot back up to the Kingston ferry. After the crossing he rode like the wind out to some obscure lake on the peninsula, found the cache, and glommed onto the Jeep. The only thing that would make this more perfect is if I could have been along for the find. However, it needed to be done quickly and on a motorcycle (to get to the head of the ferry line--90-minute wait for cars!) and of course I don't have one anymore. For those of you who will be seeing us in the next few days, we'll bring the Jeep so you can feast your winkers on it and maybe, if you've been extra good, touch it. Damn, Shawn's good. Now we just have to research a good cache to drop it in for the next finder, which probably means going for a serious trek, as you don't want to drop it in any old 1/1 grab-and-go.

SQUEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

Current Mood: bouncy

Everybody who hiked up a mountain last night in the rain looking for a Jeep, raise your hand. ::raises hand:: ::looks around:: ::lowers hand:: That's what I thought. So yesterday afternoon we found another Jeep listed in a cache about 1.7 miles up (and I use the word advisedly) Tiger Mountain. We dashed home right after work, geared up, and drove to the trailhead, just in time to hit a squall that seemed to travel along with us the whole time. We gained about 600 feet of elevation up an interminable series of long hills and then bushwhacked 100 feet through the brambles. The rain stopped when we topped out onto the ridge, and we had 11 satellites to aid us in our search for the cache. S found it in about 5 minutes and it was a pretty clever hide. He's trying to help me develop geosense by having me look at an area and determine what doesn't look right, what looks artificial or out of place, and I wish I had found this one. So imagine my bone-weary disappointment when we read the log and saw that somebody had gotten there at 2:45 p.m. and taken the Jeep already. I confess that I burst into tears (twice, actually) because we had worked so hard to get up there. Curse these people who don't have day jobs and can just take off anytime and snaffle up all the good caches. I kind of decided I don't want to chase Jeeps anymore because the disappointment is too much for me. ( But all is not lost... )

Current Mood: disappointed

Last night we raced home so we could head out and nab a quick 1/1 that we missed this weekend on account of not wanting to pay $5 for the privilege of parking on their property. No problem! Just before we went out, we downloaded three more in that general area to hit on an entirely spontaneous basis. How spontaneous? So spontaneous that we skipped our usual step of carefully printing out the cache info for each one (which, you will recall, is on my list of burdensome responsibilities). This turned out to be an arrestingly stupid idea. Lessons learned: (1) If you don't even know what *size* of a cache you're looking for (ammo can? pill bottle?), you have absolutely no idea where in all those cubic yards of space to look. (2) There is much valuable info in the Web logs left by previous hunters, so bring it along and use it. (3) If you fail to print out the hint and bring it, you will inevitably need it (and of course misinterpreting hints is *also* my job).

( 2 for 4... )

ETA: Well crap. Never mind. Somebody else already went out and snaffled it--LAST NIGHT. We'll never get a Jeep. Ever.

Current Mood: disappointed

We spent all of Saturday geocaching and added ten more finds to our total (which you can see updated in my LJ user info). An already-warm summer day gets a lot warmer when you have to wear heavy jeans, but I have no choice because we're schlepping through brambles and nettles. S wore shorts and I just do not see how he escaped turning into a solid mass of scratches and welts. We started with a nutritious foundation of dim sum for lunch--got to keep those critical shu mai levels up. The first hunt of the day was also our first multicache. ( A whatsitcache? )

A very good evening of geocaching! We had five lined up, starting with that bastardly one we missed the night I had to pee. On our way to it, we witnessed an automobile accident. Seriously, it happened two feet in front of us. We lost 15 minutes or so while S waited to give his eyewitness account to the police. Everybody was fine, if profoundly irritated, and we were soon on our way. We needed the hint to find the gc, but S spotted it--interesting camo job!--and we signed the log and hit the road. Number two was not very interesting, but it's a notch on the old stick, so we dutifully logged it with TNLN and headed north a bit to Tukwila. Number three was a pond that is a significant stop on the migration route for various birds, but we were flailing through the bush and didn't see any birds. However, we did score our first travel bug, Wellington the Koala! He's trying to make his way back to Brisbane, Australia, so we will deposit him in another gc soon. Hopefully he'll be picked up by somebody with a wider roaming range who can help him on his way. At some point a small, dark little animal scuttled through some brush. S thought it was a rat, but *I* prefer to think it was a young mink because wild rats give me the screaming ab-dabs.

( Night falls earlier every day. )

Today we headed south and west to explore an area we knew very little about--Gig Harbor and the peninsula. We loaded in six gcs, of which we ended up finding five (and bailed on the sixth only because it was positively infested with muggles, not because we couldn't find it). I deliberately chose caches with low difficulty and terrain ratings, nothing more than 2/2, so we'd have a chance of finding them all. As it turned out, we spent most of the time driving around trying to find the general gc locations, let alone fishing around for Altoids tins. When you download a gc into your GPSr, you don't get much information--just the coordinates. The GPSr compass shows the direction you're heading with a swinging arrow showing you where you *should* be going, plus your distance from the gc and how long it should take to arrive at your current speed. But our unit, designed only for geocaching and not for automobile navigation, doesn't tell you which roads to take to get there! It is so frustrating to be half a mile from the site and yet not know how to get there from here! The only reason this works at all is because Shawn is a truly superior navigator. Even in areas that he's never visited before, he has a sense of where roads should be, and how we may need to go north to eventually go south. I'd have given up long ago if it weren't for this peculiar (but welcome) ability of his!

( More yapping... )

Man, I'm beat, so this will be short. We hit four gcs in the south end this evening after work, which would sound extremely impressive except that three of them were in the same park. It was easy to schlep from one to the next, yet still a good workout. The first one we took nothing and left nothing, as we didn't have anything to go with the "sports" theme. The second we took nothing and left nothing (hereafter to be abbreviated as TNLN) just because it was easier this way. The third we TNLN because it was a very small gc and there were enough muggles (non-cachers) around that we didn't want to dick around in the open where somebody might see us.

( But what about the bunnies? )

Tonight we did a little impromptu geocaching after a dinner that involved some quantity of tequila that shall not be named. ::shifty eyes:: We grabbed Kij's GPS and downloaded a 1/1 traditional microcache in the heart of Ballardia. The search was rewarded in about 5 minutes, so we adjourned to Cupcake Royale to replenish our critically depleted buttercream reserves. A babycache deserves a babycake, is the way we see it. This is our first urban cache and Kij's first gc find. All in all, a very good evening. Plus the mice are the sweetest things you can imagine, if you are in the mood to imagine some mice. Caroline stole my heart, along with the bottom 1/8" or so of some of my hair. She was snuggled in the crook of my arm happily harvesting hairtips. This may be the world's least efficient method of trimming split ends, but I guarantee you it is the cutest.

Nine caches down and one to go to hit the magic TEN, at which point we will feel less like rank n00bs and more like common-or-garden-variety n00bs.

Mission accomplished on getting some key gear Saturday! REI parted us from a giant swack of cash in return for some excellent hiking boots with insoles and a high-tech telescoping walking stick for me, and a nifty olive green carrying bag for S. The GPS unit made out like a bandit, with several accessories purchased specifically for its benefit: a miniature boombox to play Barry White CDs to put the GPS in the mood, a tiny handheld massager to help the GPS relax after a hard day of getting us within 40 feet of a buried Altoids tin, and a solar-powered mineral water chiller/mister in case the GPS gets thirsty or its screen gets dusty.

( But seriously. )

They can say the Washington State Flower is the rhododendron, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the fricking blackberry. Got a little later start tonight than I would have liked and picked a gc with a difficulty of 1.5 and terrain of 2.5 (out of 5, with 5 being highest). ( Hah, she said bitterly. )

S and I are always a little late to the party, and we just started geocaching today. (I know--so 2001!) We went out this evening and quickly found our first gc in a small suburban park. I told S that he was the brawn and I was the brains, but I had to revise that to he is the brawn and he is the brains after he found the box while I was still standing around looking for spiders. The second cache proved much more difficult, as we don't yet trust our brand-new GPS and were positive it was pointing in the entirely wrong direction. We finally sorted it out and found the gc with just a bit of daylight to spare. Negative: Damn blackberry brambles everywhere. Positive: Blackberries in season--tasty! We were not properly equipped this evening--bad shoes and too-thin of shirts for wrestling brambles. I would like to have a walking stick for terrain like this, better shoes, a light denim jacket, and fannypack. My biggest challenge is my joints; I worry about turning an ankle or blowing my knees (worse than they already are). Let's see how long S and I can play in this hobby before we devolve into squabbling like dingoes over a baby.

If you play, our online name is The Weaselden--of course!