Snakes on a Cache

Ok, technically there were no snakes this week, but I figure if Snakes on a Plane can make millions with just a title (trust me, I've seen it, it has no plot) then maybe I can too. Besides, our readers seem to enjoy us risking being bitten by snakes. Unfortunately, this week we had Ashlynne's sister and her two kids along and Lisa insisted we give the snakes a skip when her kids were with us (the nerve of some people...). So this week should probably be called "Kids in a Minivan" but that just doesn't have the same ring.

We met at Tserof's house to begin our trip. I stayed in my van, figuring Lisa and the kids would go in hers and I would take mine as usual. What I didn't know is that my "friends" had sold me out before I got there, plotting to take Mad Mike's nephew Brian's car. Brian is a sucker, er "muggle" who read our blog and still wanted to come with us. Fool.

Anyway, Brian's car has something my van does not, namely working air conditioning (anyone know a good, cheap, AC mechanic?) so my "friends" decided to take his car instead. Only one problem. Brian's car holds 5, but that becomes 4 (and barely that) when 3 of the people top 350 lbs. Since there were 7 of us not counting the kids, that meant two of us now had to take the kiddie-van.

They all looked at me with pity, and not a little bit of amusement.

"They're your family, Gryph", Fish tells me, hiding a smirk. "I'm pretty sure that means you have to ride with the kiddies." Tserof, who has extensive experience in cars with Ashlynne's crazy New York family, at least had the decency to feel bad about his Brutus role. "I'm sorry, man...", he said solemnly. "Dude. I'm so sorry..."

Yeah, so was Judas...

I should point out here that I bear no real animosity toward any of Ashlynne's family (not most of the time anyway) and I love the kids like they're blood, but I geocache not so much to explore or to find stuff, but to hang out with my friends, ride around, and shoot the breeze. Suddenly, I find myself separated from them and riding as the only man in a car filled with women and children. My testosterone drops by the minute....

As I said, Tserof is the only one who truly knew the fate he had doomed me to, so decided to at least pull the knife out a little bit by offering me one of the walkie talkies we have so I could communicate a bit with the rest of them.

We got into the car and prepared to head for Huntsville, and things got worse.... Lisa puts in a cd, which scares me immediately given Lisa's love of "Big Hat" country bands (remind me sometime to tell you about the trip to Ohio that involved hearing "Honkey Tonk Badonkadonk" 25000 times). The good news is, it wasn't Big Hat Country. The bad news is... it's "Car Songs for Kids."

And there you have the soundtrack for my day friends, as the speakers began to blare about some poor unfortunate whose parents named him John Jacob Jinglehammer Smith or something similar. I make a mental note to add Anacin to the list of things we should bring on a caching run....

On the way to Huntsville, I learned all kinds of things. I learned that D is for Drums (this was followed by a drum solo that sounded like John Bonham if John Bonham had epilepsy...), I learned that Little Bunny Foo Foo is a right bastard if you're a field mouse, I learned that my Bonny lies over the ocean, and that the wheels on the bus go round and round but that no matter how much you beg, the bus will not back up and run you over, ending your misery.

Finally, we reach our first cache, which was "North Parkway Drive-in." Pretty easy cache to find and a nice start to the day. I was never here when the old drive-in was here, so it was interesting to see the remains. I love drive-ins and miss their prominence (although the one in Lewisburg, Tn is still active and a great deal if you're ever in the area). This week was, along with a trip for the kids, a bug hunt as we planned to grab several bugs to move along, since we plan to cache up in Tennessee next week and figured we'd help Bama's bugs along. We found a bug here, attached to a "Number 5", so we grabbed it to move along. The kids were in heaven, seeing a box full of toys that they could pick from. We had a bit of trouble convincing the three year old that he could only have one, as the little klepto kept trying to pocket more stuff when we weren't looking, but we finally got them sorted out and moved on.

Our next cache was Grizzly Gator, so named due to a big wooden bear nearby. The kids liked the bear and they liked the cache (or the toys more accurately). Jonah, the three year old, was still trying to figure it all out, but Noah, the four year old, was becoming a pretty good asset at this point, able to get into spots us fat people can't and find caches.

Next up was Rocky's First Cache. We saw "Land Trust" on the description and got a little scared. Visions of Huntsville mountain danced before us. Fortunately, this was only the parking lot of the land trust office. I won't spoil the hide other than to say that it's a decent hide for a parking lot cache, a lot better than your typical "mag key hider under a lampshade" type of thing. Inside were a number of bugs. Not wanting to hog the entire Huntsville bug collection (we were shooting for one bug per person who had a GC account), we left "5" behind and grabbed a couple of others. Mad Mike, a Mustang enthusiast of some reknown, grabbed the "Mustang Sally" coin for his and I grabbed the "I Found it!" bug, which is attached to a cell phone. I just thought it looked cool. I didn't know until I got home that I would be the first to find it and that it was created due to some real-life events I've recently been reading about over on the Dixie Cachers forum. Very cool. It wants to move as far from Alabama as possible so I'm going to help it along well into Tennessee next week.

Just so you know, if you are an old lady, and you swallow a fly, don't follow it up with a horse... Just saying...

On the ride to our next cache, Springs Time, I decided to share the love, placing the radio Tserof graciously gave me by the speaker and triggering the button so the other car could also learn that you should not put your head in a skunk hole, but should take it out, take it out, remove it...

Not much to tell about Springs Time. Pretty area. Fairly easy find. By this time, Jonah had developed a weird obsession with rubber balls, taking one from every cache we found that had one and even trading some of the toys he had found in other caches for them if there were two. No idea why, but the child had about 8 of them by the end of the day and seemed pretty happy with himself for it. Maybe he plans to become a juggler.

Next up was "To be Treed or not to be Treed". Don't remember much about this one. After that was "Walk to Nowhere." Excellent hide here. Cache is in plain sight but it's made to look like it belongs so it probably would have fooled us a few weeks ago. Maybe we are getting better.

But I doubt it...

We went looking for "One for the Little Guys" since it was billed as being for kids but couldn't find anyplace to park that didn't look like we'd be towed or run over, so we moved on.

Elementary Cache was next, after a good lunch at Beauregards. We weren't expecting an uphill hike and, while it was nothing compared to Monte Sano, I was wishing by the end that I hadn't tested the "all you can eat" policy on Beauregard's chicken wings...

Next up was Charger Blue, on the UAH campus. It's on UAH campus. Nice spot. While we were there, we took Fish and Brian to score "It's Not Easy Being Green", which the rest of us got at the Huntsville Meet and Greet. Only thing of interest to happen here was that I convinced Noah that if he didn't frog-hop all the way from the car to the tree, the cache wouldn't be there. It's fun being the subversive uncle sometimes...

Next up was All American Cache. Nice little hobbit-hole type area. Cool spot to hide a cache. Again, Noah came in handy as he was the only one small enough to climb in and get the thing.

By this time the kids were getting tired and I had begun to go insane (more than normal that is) from the constant barrage of saccharin kid voices singing about how they lost their poor meatball when somebody sneezed. We decided to do one more and call it a day.

Final cache was Girs Went a Courting. Not too hard to find, once we found the spot it was in. As usual with the Zen Bassmasters, we turned around quite a bit to find it.

At the end, we headed back home as I promised to immediately put on some death metal to purge my mind.

100% for the day, even though it was pretty easy stuff. Still impressive for us. I guess it was a successful day. The kids certainly seemed to catch the bug, although I think Fish's long day of caches was too much for them, as this is how they looked shortly after we started home...




Next week, we're back to our traditional death-defying, snake attracting ways, as we visit the Jack Daniels' Distillery to grab some fire station pictures for a bug we have and to do the cache there, and then on to Tim's Ford Lake to place the ones we got this week.

We also plan to hide the second part of our History of Lincoln County series, titled Ice-T. Assuming we pass the review-nazis, I'll have the link for you here soon.