Caching my Way Back Home- Part 2

Took me a while but I'm back. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait. If you're here looking for this week's new adventures of the Zen Bassmasters, you'll have to be patient. It'll be up sometime soon, but not tonight as I still have part 2 of last week's cache to do.

I've gotten a couple of different comments this week about the diminishing humour level of the blog recently and I would probably be offended by that if a) I didn't know at least one of the senders is a nasty, evil hobbit out to play mind games with a poor Smeagol and b) it wasn't completely and totally true despite all that. Truth is, there have been a number of reasons for this. One is the simple fact that, as most of you who saw me sniffling through last week's event probably know, I've been a bit sick and when my sinuses get upset, my funny bone tneds to go with it. Second is that Tserof has been having some personal emergencies that he can get into or not if he likes but it boils down to Tserof being the "Larry" of our group. He's not really the "Curly", aka the funny one (that's probably me a bit but more Mike when he gets on a roll) and he's not the "Moe" aka the violent one/leader (definitely Fish) but Tserof is the springboard from which most of our best jokes come from. The good news is, we got Tserof back for this week's trip so come back for that one and hopefully I'll be back on form.

That said, on to the Adios Dog Days Meet and Greet at the Guadalajara restaurant in Huntsville.

A lot of the same crowd as the previous events. Hobbits and hobbit sympathizers were out in force as Toids, Cacheburns, and Rick618 were all in attendance to laugh at the stories of how their caches had beaten the poor defenseless Bassmasters down and hurts our feetses, yes precious they did. But we have a surprise for them, precious. Yes we do. Precious... Precious...

Sorry, bit of a tangent there... Where was I? Oh, yes. The event. Evil hobbitses aside, some of our other friends were there as well as some others we hadn't met before (and if we don't mention you, it's not a slight. I suck with names).

Let me say I was surprised at how many people actually recognized the name Zen Bassmasters. I guess word of us has spread. Stupidity travels far. The part that truly surprised me is that we actually had people asking how they could become Zen Bassmasters. As I told many people, we have adopted a modified version of the famous Groucho Marx quote as a membership requirement. Groucho said "I would not join any club that would have me as a member." For the Bassmasters, it's reversed. We fear for the sanity of anyone who would actually like to join us and we don't want to be on their little list when they decide to climb to the top of a church tower and start picking people off with high powered rifles. We hurt ourselves enough on our own.

While we waited for the food to arrive, I engaged Cacheburns in a conversation about our cache Ice-T, which he had recently found. To his credit, he was pretty helpful in evaluating it for me and offering opinions on my difficulty rating. Yes, I said it. A hobbit was helpful. Does this mean the Zen Bassmasters are casting in with our mortal enemies? Not at all. I just know my enemy well and know that hobbits can't inflict any harm on poor defenseless orcs in the midst of food. It's some kind of hairy-footed honor system or something. We still look around suspiciously at the mention of Monte Sano, and we always will.

At this point, our very favorite cacher in the world, RN2B, showed up. I've mentioned it before but we like RN2B. She gets us. Nice easy, non-evil caches that mentally challenged geocachers (like us for instance) can still find. We talked with her for a while and I (unsuccessfully) attempted to work out a health insurance plan with her to be the Zen Bassmasters' personal nurse (trust me, as much as we get hurt, it's a full time job for someone). Apparently RN2B doesn't take my Cigna. Either that or she's (rightfully) offended by being done the dishonor of being made an honorary Bassmaster. Either way, we're still on the lookout for a personal nurse so if there are any other RNs (2B or otherwise), we need you. Hell, we'd settle for a newly-trained CNA at this point, or even someone who's just watched a lot of ER reruns. Let's face it, if you can say things like "20cc of glucozapofire" and yell "stat!" a lot, we're not going to be smart enough to know you haven't got any medical training.

RN2B also denied scheming with Rick to send us to do the Huntsville Mountain caches in order to kill us and get herself 5 free cadavers to do whatever medical students do with cadavers. For that matter, Rick denied ever sending us after the Jolly Green series at all, saying that he didn't recommend us doing them, but only said they were "really cool."

See, that's like throwing a bag of candy into a pit of snakes and then saying it isn't your fault when your three year old dives in. We're not very smart, as has been documented again and again in these pages. You may say things like "really hard, tough hike, probably not good to do in the summer, take lots of water", etc. but all we're going to hear is "cache shaped like a great big toothbrush!!!!!... and something about a mountain or hill or something."

As is always the case when we go to events, we had plenty of people wanting to send bugs with us that were travelling north, just as last week we had lots of Middle Tennessee folks wanting to send stuff south with us. We've kind of become an "underground railroad" for travel bugs. We try to stagger our trips now so we go north one week, grab a bunch of bugs, and do Alabama the next week to drop them off. I may even scout out an underground railroad TB motel at some point for people to drop things for us to grab and move on.

While we ate, we talked with a fellow named "Chupacabra". Now Fish and I were both avid Art Bell listeners a few years ago while working overnight security at a juvenile wilderness correction camp so we both knew that the chupacabra is also known as the "Goat Slayer" and has quite the reputation among the types of people who wear tinfoil hats and try to hitch rides to heaven on comets. Supposedly the chupacabra only comes out at night to kill livestock and occasionally a human.

So we decided to invite him along to do a night cache with us...

We leave the event and head on over to do Bump in the Night, which most of us did at the last Huntsville event but which Fish has not done. Fish has been wanting to place a night cache so we took him to the only one we knew of in the area. Good thing we brought chupacabra along too as it turned out Ash and I had a dead flashlight and Fish had only a pitiful little light that didn't shine very far (ah, preparation!). Not a terribly hard find, but it was fun watching them try to locate it as we stood back, knowing the location for a change.

The cache was found, the log was signed, and everyone had a good time. We didn't even get killed by the legendary chupacabra, although I did feel a bit woozy afterward so it's possible he nabbed some of my blood while I wasn't looking. Chupacabras are sneaky like that (they may be hobbit-descended for all I know). Of course, the dizziness could have been tequila too. One or the other...

That's it for the event. Come back in a few days and we should have up our adventures from Smyrna this week. As a preview, let me say it involves shattering Fish's dreams, lots of rain, a possible new player in the hobbit-sympathizer ranks, and the words "Tserof's ghetto princess" more than once.

Until next time...

-Gryph