Midnight Madness

This is going to be the world's shortest edition of Adventures in Geocaching from the standpoint of geocaching because we only managed to find one cache this week. We had good intentions and a full plan of caches, but a variety of factors kept us from caching this week.

1. I had just been to the emergency room with what I thought was a broken foot (but which turned out not to be), putting Ash and I in bed about 4 am with a 10 am meet planned.

2. Our "hide one cache in this little park in Fayetteville" trip took 3 hours as we found the park had two miles of walking trails that none of us knew about so we explored (slowly, my foot was still unhappy) and are planning a couple of multis and some singles along the trail. Don't want to say too much about that yet, stay tuned.

3. I came home from the ER with a bottle of Lortabs for my foot, rendering me loopy for the entire day.

Our soundtrack for the week is "Live on St. Patrick's Day" by the Dropkick Murphys.

We did manage to get one cache done, Pico Inferno, by that evilest of hobbits, Cacheburns. And it didn't disappoint. I won't give away the hide but I will say I'm now 75% blind in both eyes. Damn hobbits!

What we did do, however, was attend a very unique event that night. It was the Royal Order of the Sleepless Knights event in Bell Buckle. The uniqueness? It began at midnight. If you didn't make the event for something stupid like sleep, shame on you. Not a lot of people showed (averaged about 15 but I think there was up to 30 at one point. The lortabs made counting difficult as there was three of everybody) but it was an absolute blast. Nothing "official", no big cache runs, no lackeys or doorprizes, just a bunch of people sitting around in the middle of the night trading war stories. Since I hate crowds, this was great for me.

I guess the first thing to tell you is that this event became the first (and likely only) FTF in ZB history. The event listing only had coordinates for parking and threatened a walk of up to 2 miles so we showed an hour early. Turns out the walk was about 100 yards so we were quite early. Poor Monkeybrad at this point had to be wondering about the wisdom of putting on an event that looked like it was going to cause him to have to spend the night with the likes of us.

Fortunately for him, others showed up and saved him from death by boredom. We got to spend some time quizzing Maxcacher (aka "the Spanish Inquisition) about the caches we had planned that day and BackBrakeBilly spent a lot of time giving us tips on making our geocoin (remember the Zen Bassmasters geocoin? Yeah, neither does Tserof, our point man on it...)

The highlight of the night was a dedicated group of cachers who headed out to one of our previous finds, Sledgehammer, to retrieve the Pet Rock TB from its longtime hiding place. I don't know who ended up taking it home but more power to them. For those who didn't read the previous blog, Pet Rock is a TB attached to a rock that has to weigh about 100 lbs. I don't know where you'd hide it or how you'd get it there without giving yourself a hernia, but hopefully someone will manage.

By about 5 am, the lortabs had finally gotten the best of me and the sight of triple Monkeybrads overcame my sense of reason (not to mention I had already drunk all of Brad's mint tea so my mission was done) so we headed out.

Not a very funny blog this week, which I'm sure I'll get shit for from someone, but that's the way they fall sometimes. All I can say is tune in next week, weather permitting, as we are finally going to attempt to throw the monkey off our backs.

Yep, we're going back where it all began... Back to Fellowship of the Bling. Assuming we don't die, it should provide interesting blogging. Stay tuned.