How to DNF an Entire Frickin' River- 7/29/06

This past Saturday was an unusual caching day for the Zen Bassmasters. It was the Summer Shoals Meet and Greet, our second meet in a week. Apparently, idiocy has its own form of celebrity as we had several people say they liked our blog and asking us to come. It's about a 80 minute drive from Fayetteville (in perfect conditions, more on that later) but the Zen Bassmasters believe in keeping their friends close and evil scheming hobbits closer, so we figured we'd better go and make sure Frodo behaved and didn't lead any unsuspecting newbies into the depths of Mordor. The soundtrack for this week is Tom Petty's new album "Highway Companion", featuring the Zen Bassmasters new theme song "Turn This Car Around." More on that later too.

We set out at about 11 am, figuring two hours should be plenty of time to get there. You'd think we would learn eventually, but we never do. The trip down was mostly uneventful (if hot. the AC's out in my van). The kicker came when we got near Sheffield. There was some discussion about one of two ways to get to Sheffield. Ashlynne was being told to go different directions, sometimes at the same time. Poor confused girl. Added to that was our need to find a grocery store as we hadn't bought any food to bring to the event beyond Ash's deviled eggs. With three of the four of us being on the Atkins diet, we weren't sure there's be enough food that we could eat. Surely, we thought, there's a Kroger or something in Sheffield.

Actually, there's not, as we discovered. We did see a Foodland, on the other side of the road, across traffic and a median. Finally, we decided we'd just roll the dice on there being enough food and just press on, as we were just barely going to be on time.

Then we hit Sheffield proper...

When I say "Sheffield proper", you have to understand that no one lives in Sheffield. No one. The entire town is empty, or at least the part we saw was. It looked like the set from one of those post-apocolyptic movies.

The other thing you need to know about Sheffield is that the roads make no sense. 3 or 4 roads converge together and none seem to lead anywhere. Roads turn into 1 way streets without warning, double back on themselves, and confuse. We ran up on this big water tower looking thing with a roundabout going around it. This became a familiar sight as we somehow managed to circle this thing at least 5 times. All roads led to this tower. I've been watching Stephen King's Nightmares and Dreamscapes the last couple of weeks and this was beginning to look like an episode straight from it. Either that or Groundhog Day.

How, you may ask, do we not find a park, in a small town, that we have coordinates to in a GPS? Because we're the Zen Bassmasters and that's how we roll...

First problem was, the GPS kept insisting that the park was out in the middle of the river. Second problem was that we could SEE the river, but could never find a road to take us to where we needed to go. Around and around we went. Oh look, the tower thing... Let's try this one way street leading AWAY from the tower, which somehow... still leads us back to the tower. No, I'm not sure how that's possible, but it happened.

In the end, it took us an hour to find the park. Yes, you read that right. We almost DNF'd an event. I'm pretty sure that's a first...

But we found it, finally, after locating the only functional business in Sheffield and asking directions.

So we did get to the event, bringing the rain with us unfortunately, and also unfortunately missing the brief appearance of Cyrusel, our blog's only fan. But there were lots of other people there, some we'd met, some we'd not, and fortunately, enough Atkins-friendly food to eat. Good thing we brought drinks along with us (having finally learned our lesson in Adequate Hydration 101.)

I suck bad with names so I'm not even going to try to put down everyone we talked to because I'd certainly forget someone. Frodo was there, eating as any good hobbit would be, and likely plotting the untimely demise of the Zen Bassmasters. Rick618 and RN2B from the event last Tuesday were there, and several others from the Dixie Cachers board.

Lots of nice comments about the blog. All are appreciated. We'll keep doing stupid stuff for your amusement as long as you'll keep reading about it.

We also got into a discussion with some folks about making a custom geocoin, as we're in serious discussion now with a couple of coin makers for the first ZB coin. Saw a lot of neat coins and travelbugs and dropped off a couple of our own. If you run across Ashlynne's Home Sweet Home coin, do us the favor of moving it northward. Why she took it 75 miles south of our home when its goal is to make it to New York, I don't know. Actually, having driven with Ashlynne providing directions in the past, I can understand it...

After the event, the Bassmasters, Frodo, Icewoman, WheresDiB, Will2003, and Tasia went on a run of micros around the Sheffield area. Had some luck too. I don't know if that's just because their skill outpaced our ineptitude or if Fish is just our bad luck in the group, since he didn't show this week. I can't remember all the cache names offhand so I'm not going to list them individually. They were urban micros so even Team Zen Bassmasters couldn't screw them up too badly.

Yes, Team Zen Bassmasters, or TZB. We needed one name to sign the micro logs and that was Tasia's suggestion. "You've read our blog?", I asked her. "Yes," she assured me. "So you know taking on the ZB name, even for a day, is a sure ticket to DNF heaven?" I asked. They seemed ok with that so on we pressed. Hopefully our awful luck didn't hurt them on their cache runs toward home.

After a few caches, the groups split up, since some of us were going northward and some south. Tasia was nice enough to invite us down to Birmingham to cache that area and we plan to eventually take her up on the offer.

All in all, a good day. Good food, good people, a lot of cool coins and bugs, and some good caching. Thanks to everyone who made a bunch of stupid newbies feel like family.

Next week, Huntsville and the Jolly Green series. Wish us luck... I heard the word "mountain."