Geocaching Hootenanny: 7/22/06

This week is a different week for us as our geocaching trip is also a celebration of Ashlynne getting a new job. So we've got some extra people along this week. Our usual crew of me, Ashlynne, Tserof, Mad Mike, and Fish are along, but we've also got Fish's wife Khri, his 3-year old son Vorin, and our friend Doc. Our soundtrack for this week is a mix of my blues collection in honor of Doc coming along.

Because we had all of the new people along, we decided to do some low-impact caches in the Lewisburg area to get our new folks' feet wet, and end the day with a cook-out at Berlin Springs park, which we found on a cache run a few weeks ago.

Our first cache was called "Rocks" and it was aptly named as the GPS pointed us to a big pile of rocks on the side of the road. We were a bit apprehensive, having just last week spent 15 minutes trying to find the one dark rock in a huge pile of rocks. Needless to say, the 3 year old LOVED the big rocks. The rest of us... not so much. As Mad Mike pointed out "until last week I hadn't climbed a rock pile since I was 10 and now I've done it twice."

The cache was listed as a large cache so you'd think it'd be easy to find. But you'd be wrong. Once again, we turned over rock after rock and once again we found nothing. The three year old, who is in a pirate kick recently, was unhappy that his "treasure hunt" has produced no treasure. Finally, we logged it as a DNF and moved on.

Next up is a cache called The Bumpiest Bridge in the Land and boy did it live up to the claim. Fish, in his giant Jeep, drove across it easily. We, in my Plymouth Voyager minivan, did not. This has been a recurring problem in our geocaching trips. My minivan is more suited for hauling children to soccer games than to off-roading so the ground clearance is not so good. Add to that the fact that there were 4 people in the van who went near or over 400lbs and another who goes over 200 and the van looked like one of those low-rider cars you see cruising around the mall on Saturday night. All I needed was some bumpy music and a sideways hat and I'd be set. On top of that, Ashlynne was driving.

It's a testament to how much my daily 50 mile commute to work has put me off driving that I let Ashlynne drive my van on these trips. It's not that Ash is a bad driver... Ok, it really IS that Ash is a bad driver. She's from New York and, having ridden with several members of her family, I'm pretty sure they all drive that way. In our weeks of geocaching, we've left little bitty pieces of my transmission in 12 counties now over 2 states.

Anyway, I start to freak out as Ash heads toward the bridge and I can hear my mechanic smiling all the way in Fayetteville. But this bridge is bad enough that even Ash decides maybe the mini isn't up for it and parks on the other side. Once again the 3 year old jumps out of Fish's Jeep excited about a great treasure hunt. Once again, he's destined to be disappointed as this week's episode of Zen Bassmaster Geocaching is being brought to you by the letters D, N, and F. We kind of expected this one going in as the last two logs were DNF but it was on the way so we thought we'd give it a go. Sure enough, no dice on the find. Little Vorin was not amused. We tried to explain to him that pirates had to dig through a lot of places before finding treasure but he wasn't buying it. You'd think having two doses of Zen Bassmasters genetics from his mom and dad would make him accustomed to failure straight from the womb but apparently not.

Trying to avert a micro-pirate mutiny, we quickly loaded back up into the car and moved on to our next cache, Yanahli Gatekeeper. This one's description promised what looked to be a park and grab, and had been found earlier this month so we hoped this would finally be where Vorin got to claim his "treasure."

It wasn't looking great when we first got there. The road was only a road in the academic sense that cars might once have traveled it successfully. Again, Fish's Godzillajeep had no problems but my poor van was demanding combat pay. We get parked and got out. The GPS pointed in a bunch of trees but there didn't seem to be any cache around. Finally we cast about for a little bit and Fish located something that looked likely. It was kind of a lunchpail looking container. We sent Vorin in to retrieve it, hoping that this really was the cache and not the weeks-old remains of someone's picnic. Vorin brought it out of the hiding place and we all held our breath, waiting for the odor of rotten tuna fish sandwiches. Fortunately, it was the cache and loaded with 3-year old appropriate toys. Vorin looked like he'd been given the keys to his own Toys-R-Us store.

We settled down to the serious task of choosing a prize. Vorin looked through the cache and decided he wanted all of it. "Oh great", I thought. "That should put me in good standing with the trade Nazis who have chastised me over some of our previous trades being $.04 less than what we left or something." Fortunately, we convinced Vorin that he had to leave all but one item so future pirates would have treasure to dig up too. He seemed ok with that, being a socialist pirate and believing in fair distribution of booty among the classes, and picked out a squirt gun as his prize.

While we were replacing the cache and getting our gear ready for the next one, we sent Ashlynne on alone in the van to turn around (as the road was too narrow to turn here). Just as she gets out of sight, Fish pulls up the cache in the GPS and sees that it's off in the direction we just sent Ashlynne to go turn around. Figures. We decide since it's only .3 miles away, we'll just walk it. As we're walking along, we meet Ashlynne coming back and tell her the "good news." She wasn't amused and trundled off back down the other way to find yet another place to turn around. We walked on and Ash caught up to us just as we got to the cache, called "Short but Stout, a Tribute to the Bridge Builder." Let me just say WOW. This is the reason I geocache. Actually, my description will never do this justice so let me post a picture.



The picture doesn't really even do it justice as you really had to be there and see the whole thing. Beautiful old stone bridge built who knows when by someone with a ton of skill. We can't even begin to speculate on how long this must have taken with the technology they had at the time but it's a tribute to what the old guys could do.

After seeing the bridge, the cache was an afterthought to everyone but our budding pirate Captain Vorin the Small. We quickly found the cache and got Vorin his loot, then stood around for a while longer looking at the really cool bridge. Did I mention it was cool? It was cool. If I had to pick a time that I saw the "geocaching addiction" light go on in Doc's eyes, it's here. Doc, our resident historian and knower-of-all-things (but in an Einstein way, not a Cliff Clavin way) was tickled to death.

Our next cache was Under Pressure. The description had a nice long piece about the Tennessee Natural Gas pipeline. This one was promised as a park and grab and it lived up to every bit of its name as Khri had found the cache before the rest of us had gotten out of the car. Once again, Vorin took his pick of the treasure, this time choosing a pair of sunglasses that looked like they came from the Liberace collection, causing his father, who has visions of the little guy becoming something like a diesel mechanic or backhoe driver or something similarly manly, to groan.

Vorin then decided to play with the glasses and the gun at the same time. Let me tell you, he looked like Elton John had been tagged to play James Bond. All he needed was a license to accessorize.

Actually, let me show you as this was just too fun to not show a picture of, and I know it will drive Fish crazy...



We loaded up and headed for the next cache, called "Who Tilled the Soil With Mules and Plows", which was a cemetary cache. Yay. I love cemetary caches. As we pulled up to the church, which was quite beautiful by the way, we noticed a truck with a mower on it parked down by the road. We looked around and didn't see the mower so we went in hoping to grab the cache and get out before the muggle noticed us. No dice. The clue said "under one of the boxwood trees by the gate." Tserof, who gave himself the name Dr. Dendrology a few weeks back if you remember, pointed to this gigantic oak in the middle of the cemetary and proclaimed that a boxwood. We were pretty sure he was wrong since it looked like a huge oak and was smack in the middle of the cemetary but he's Dr. Dendrology so we headed that way, reading some of the old markers on the way. Just as we had officially decided to change Tserof's title to "Dr. Dingbat" and move to what we were pretty sure actually were the boxwoods located right beside the gate, the muggle decided to come over and see what we were up to. Having GPS units and digging under a tree, we decided that telling him we were looking for our dead relatives probably wouldn't fly, so we were honest. We explained geocaching to him and told him how much we loved his church and the old cemetary. We piled it on about learning a little history. He made some comment about how far technology has come, gave us the name of an old guy down the street who "knows everything about this place" and left. I don't think we made a geocaching convert, but I don't think he'll report the cache and remove it either. He seemed ok with us being there. Nevertheless, we signed the log and headed out just in case.

Next up was Fording the Duck, which had a long history lesson in the description telling about the area's significance during the civil war. We had a bit of trouble with this one as we couldn't seem to get the two GPS units to point the same way. Tserof's kept insisting the cache was in the middle of the street and Mad Mike's kept saying it was off in the trees. Finally, Tserof spots it right near the road and we sign the log. Just a micro here so no treasure for Vorin. It's all good though, as he was still enjoying his squirt gun and sunglasses, comparing swatches with the other secret agents and shopping for track lighting.

Next up was Happy Duck River Trails. The description for this one told in great detail where it was. Easy find, right? Ah, silly reader, remember. We're the Zen Bassmasters. We can make any easy find difficult. To our credit, the coordinates were WAY off on this one. I mean WAY off. Off by a few hundred yards. Still, it told where the cache was in the description and, once someone finally bothered to go check that spot and damn the GPS, it was there. Figures...

Next up is Last of the Mojitos. This one had been logged as a DNF a few times recently but we were already there so we decided to give it a go. Beautiful area. Worth the trip for the view alone. How beautiful?



I was content to just sit and look at the water, in true Zen Bassmaster fashion, but being the group's recorder of misdeeds, I figured I better come along. Good thing I did as this turned into a doozy...

We walked along until we got to where the cache was supposed to be. Couldn't find it. We started trying to read things into the "tiki" bit and started looking in and around trees that looked vaguely tiki-ish. Course, the only one of us who knew what a tiki looked like was Khri, who had seen one watching Scooby Doo with Vorin. So we were looking for trees that looked like characters from bad Hanna Barbera cartoons.

As we're looking around, Khri looks over the side of the ledge and sees something that looks likely. "Surely not", we thought, as the climb down to it was going to be a hell of a lot more than the 2.5 terrain advertised. Of course, we have experience with this but Frodo was in no way involved in this one. Nevertheless Fish sees it and also agrees it looks a bit like a cache box. Most of us refuse to climb down the rocks to get it, not wanting a broken neck for our our troubles. Fish and Khri decide to leave Vorin with us and go down for it. I begin to have visions of both of them breaking their skulls and my inheriting a kid. We even took a picture of them climbing down, so we'd have something to give the police when they came. "No really, officer. They went down there voluntarily!"



That's Fish and Khri climbing down as Mike looks on from up top, probably thinking "What a bunch of doofuses." As they climb down, we begin to speculate on what terrain climb that is. Some said 4. I insisted it was a 5. "It can't be a 5," Fish said. "Because it doesn't require special equipment." I pointed out that serious mental illness could be considered a needed special equipment for the cache and Fish had to agree.

They go to the bottom and headed for the "cache" only to discover that the cache they had just climbed down for was actually an oil can... Yep. It's the Bassmaster way.

Fish and Khri managed to climb up without breaking their necks and we looked around a bit more for the cache but didn't find it. By now we were all tired and decided to head out for Berlin Springs and food.

We drove to Berlin Springs and discovered that apparently there was a candidates forum going on at the park (we speculated that possibly the candidates stood on the rock there in the park and made speeches) and there were officially about 100 too many muggles around to cache or cook out in there today.

So we headed for the local chinese restaurant for dinner and celebration of Ash's new job.

Yep. Our easy week of P&G caches netted us barely over 50% of the caches. Yep. It's the Bassmaster way...

Next week we'll be going to a meet and greet with our old nemesis Frodo and his group in Huntsville on Tuesday. I'm still a bit afraid he'll try to push us down a terrain 5 mountain, all the time screaming "It's a 2.5!!!" or "My precious" or something, but I never turn down an opportunity at Chinese food. Also, all of us but Fish will be at the big Meet and Greet in Sheffield on Saturday. If you're there, come by and say hello. I always like to meet people who read the journal. We won't be hard to locate. Just look for the people who look like a herd of water buffalo.