It's been that long already?
Sorry for being tardy. May is here and I have found lots of things to be done, so, I've done 'em.
Warm weather is a catalyst for a number of activities on my end. Mowing the lawn, pulling the grill out of hibernation, attempting to pull all the junk from the garage, you know, the usual sort of thing which comes around at this time of year.
It also means that I'm in the great outdoors doing some geocaching again.
A few days ago I celebrated eight years of practicing the hobby by going out and attempting to grab a series of caches placed by the Texas State Parks - a geocaching challenge. What is going on is that cachers such as myself will go out and find caches placed in each of thirteen local state parks, collect information, then turn it in for a prize to be awarded to the first 25 people who find all of the caches.
"What fun!" I thought... and I took the Lovely Miss Carol out with me to a place called Cedar Hill to find the cache placed by the Park Service at Cedar Hill. We got to the general area of the cache just before sunset and took the easy walk to the location shown on our GPS device... no problem.
Just as we had opened the box and were sorting through the goodies, we heard another couple coming down the same trail carrying their own GPS device. When they arrived, they were revealed as our friendly, neighborhood Texas State Parks people checking out the progress of their cache. We had a nice little conversation, had our pictures taken, finished the job at hand, then proceeded on to bigger and better things.
This morning, I left the house shortly after 9am to see about adding to the number of caches in the Texas Geochallenge. An hour and a little over 45 miles of battling Suburban Dallas traffic, I arrived at the DuBois unit of Lake Ray Roberts State Park and took out after what I thought would be an easy cache as a warm-up to finding the "Official" State-provided geocache. I spent a good half an hour at the indicated hiding spot before giving it up as a lost cause.
Then I went after the big prize. I re-parked the car, then hiked up the trail a good three quarters of a mile to find the box I had been looking for. In, out and that was it. No problem... that is until I decided to find another cache which was only three tenths of a mile, or 1500 feet away.
I chose to do it in a straight line, instead of taking the obvious trail in and out.
I donate blood to a blood bank which operates here in Dallas partly because of the free t-shirts. (Everyone knows that people will do anything for a free t-shirt!) Well, I was wearing one of those t-shirts when I decided to take off cross country... and wouldn't you know it, I gave blood on the way. Silly me.
The other cache was easily found and I left that particular unit of that State Park and proceeded to another section of the same park to recover yet another of the particular cache series I was hunting.
Forty minutes of driving, another 20 of hiking in, grabbing, logging and hiking out. Whew!
One more stop to make, and it was just about forty minutes away on a good day. Today, I took what turned out to be a road going in the wrong direction... then, roughly 10 minutes from the final stop... road construction. I was an hour out of home and headed into a construction zone. The better part of me decided to turn back south and hit the showers.
When I finally got back home and logged my meager finds, I came to the realization that I was probably too late to claim one of the 25 prizes being offered for the first 25 cachers to find all 13 caches in an area which from end to end represented 6 hours of travel time east to west and a good 4 hours north to south.
Needless to say, I'm hanging up that particular challenge. I'll leave it to #1 son, Stuart, who turns 15 this week.
Be Seeing You!
