Adventures in Geocaching

New Year's Resolutions

2008-01-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

I know, it's been too long. I could give you a lot of excuses for that one but the only one that matters is the Zen Bassmasters haven't been caching. Lots of reasons for that too but they're too boring to go into here.

Anyway, so you'd know I hadn't died, I thought I'd pop in here and write up some Resolutions for 2008.

1. Finish logging my finds from 2007: I think I still have some from June I never got around to.

2. More hides: Every time I go to the Elk River Coffee Shop in Fayetteville, I read some more of the History of Lincoln County book and I find a few new potential caches in the series. Unfortunately, I never seem to have these epiphanies when I have my GPSr and a nano with me.

3. Keep GPSr and nano with me anytime I go to Elk River Coffee...

4. Get to more events: For some people it's about the numbers. For some it's about the exercise. For me, it was always about the people. I've met some awesome folks in both Tennessee and Alabama since I started doing this and I've lost touch with most of them. Yeah, I hit an occasional event here and there, the most recent being MonkeyBrad's excellent Royal Order of the Sleepless Knights, but I need to work on getting to more down in Alabama. Poor Saintseester could probably use a hug after her Saints turned back into the Ain'ts this season. And I've learned it always pays to keep an eye on those nasty hobbits Cacheburns and Rick618, if only because we're the only ones who seem to know how dangerous they really are.... Besides, Rick's old lady is way cool.

5. Cache in and around Auburn: Part of the reason for our absence is the loss of our taskmaster, Vorin, who had the nerve to be supportive of his wife's ambition and move away from us. Some people's priorities are all screwed up... Anyway, Auburn presents a whole other part of Alabama as yet unspoiled by the Boys from Mordor, so I'm thinking a field trip might be in order.

6. Put a cache up in my yard: Reason #2 for our absence is that Ash and I bought a house. Who knew one little move could disrupt one's routine for so long? I know my bison tubes are around here somewhere, lurking in a box in our garage along with the camo duct tape, but if I go out there to look for it, Ash might expect me to unpack something and we can't have that...

7. Hide a cache in Alabama: Now that Alabama has a new reviewer, I can lift my embargo on hides in the state. Wonder if I can finally get my cemetery cache approved...

8. Write at least one more blog in 2008: Hey, at least I'm being realistic...

Webcomic Debut

2007-08-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

We don't have all the bells and whistles up yet for the site, but the first comic is there, updated weekly on Sunday. Enjoy.

http://zbadventures.comicgenesis.com/

Zen Bassmasters: The Next Generation

2007-08-12T16:02:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, I made an excuse for the lack of updates here. The excuse was that I have been working on a top-secret project with a friend that was going to take the Zen Bassmasters geocaching adventures into a totally different type of media.

Considering how long it's been between that post and this one, I'm sure most of you have given up on me. Oh, ye of little faith... While we're not completely ready to begin the next chapter in the Zen Bassmasters Experience, we're close. Very, very close.

So, for the readers who have stuck with me through the inactive period, I'm giving you the first look at the new venture.

Meet "Zen Bassmaster Adventures."

Yep, the Zen Bassmasters have now gone graphical. As far as we've been able to tell, we are the first geocaching webcomic anywhere.

Zen Bassmasters Adventures is a two-man operation. I am doing the writing and anyone who has read the blog will recognize some of the capers in the comic as very familiar. But the real talent here, as evidenced above, is the other half of this team, Brian Bullock. He's Mad Mike's nephew and some of you may remember him as an occasional guest star in the blog.

For right now, we're anticipating a once weekly update schedule. I have hopes for that to increase but Brian has, quite unreasonably in my opinion, insisted that he be allowed time in his week to work, sleep, eat, and socialize. The nerve of some people.

We're still working out the details of where the comic will be posted. Right now we're leaning toward Comics Genesis but that's not decided. I hope we'll have that decided in the next two to four weeks (I'm going to be out of town a lot in the next month so getting together to decide these things has been difficult) and I promise you that this will be the very first place I'll come to give everyone the URL. Keep checking in. I promise you Brian's art is worth it.

While I'm sure this doesn't make up for weeks of inactivity and neglect of my readership, I hope it helps soften the blow. I hope some of you will shoot me a comment and let me know what you think of the first comic. It's a work in progress.

Until next time, happy caching.

Fun with Google

2007-07-13T15:54:00.000-07:00

I keep a counter at the bottom of this blog which gives me the ability to see where folks who visit here click in from. Aside from all of the normal traffic from my buds at the Dixie Cachers forum, I also get quite a few hits from folks who find me through google searches.

I always find this interesting. It's really fun to see what kind of searches cause people to find my blog. It will come as no surprise to anyone who, like me, is married to a geocoin ho that the most common search to bring me visitors is "custom geocoin." My one little post about a Zen Bassmasters geocoin brings me 1-5 referrals a week. Big business that.

What is more fun is the plethora of odd little phrases or saying that I've used that seem to get searched for. I've gotten several hits from folks searching for "children's music cd" due to my post about caching with my nephews, and the musical hell that accompanied it. I also occasionally get a referral from various searches involving Huntsville. No surprise there since I talk about Huntsville a lot.

But today, I got the oddest Google hit I have ever gotten, or imagine I will ever get. It was so strange, that it has taken over my mind and consumed my day, trying to figure out exactly what the hell the person doing this search was looking for.

Someone had gone into Google to search for "Monte Sano" boobs.

Monte Sano boobs? Can someone please tell me what in the world that means? Why would someone be searching for that? If I had to vote on two separate phrases that I wouldn't think about going together, "Monte Sano" and "Boobs" would be up there.

I mean, I certainly understand how this blog ended up with a high ranking for that search. If our geocaching adventures were ever made into a Samuel L. Jackson movie, it would almost certainly be called "Boobs on a Mountain." Additionally, being fat folks, there is no shortage of "boobs" on display. One set of rather attractive ones sported by my wife Ashlynne and four sets of not-so-attractive "manboobs" sported by the rest of us.

But that doesn't answer the bigger question. What did a person want to know about that would cause him to search for "Monte Sano" boobs? I mean, I can certainly understand searching for boobs on the internet. I've done it myself on a few occasions. Boobs abound on the net, in pretty much every shape, size, and scenario imaginable. But boobs on Monte Sano? I can't say I've ever thought about that.

Ever curious and willing to go to the ends of the Earth (or at least to the ends of my keyboard) to do factual research for my readers, I did a Google image search for "Monte Sano" boobs. Ashlynne swears this "research" is an excuse to look at porn, but I deny that vehemently.

Oddly, there aren't a lot of image results for "Monte Sano" boobs. There are 10 in total. The first one is just black. The second is some random image about a lunatic. The third is this blog... None are pornographic in any way (no, I don't have safe search on, and no, that doesn't prove Ash's theory that I am searching for porn... much).

This is bugging me like that Lewis Black joke about the horse. It turns in your mind and you can't shake it. Why "Monte Sano" boobs? Why not "Monte Sano" Mons Veneris? Or "Monte Sano" cervix? Or perhaps "Monte Sano perineum? Why boobs? And why, for pete's sake, on Monte Sano?

Hopefully the person who did this search will look again, and will see this blog again. If so, please save me having a stroke and shoot me a message telling me what exactly you were looking for. I'm truly curious.

Saying Goodbye to a Bassmaster...

2007-06-26T17:56:00.001-07:00

It is with great sadness that I have to report to you the death of a founding member of the Zen Bassmasters.

Gryphon's Van, affectionately known as the "Bassmobile" to ZB fans everywhere, perished today at the Farrar Vehicle Clinic after a short battle with cancer of the transmission. After collapsing just outside of Petersburg yesterday afternoon, the Bassmobile was rushed to the Clinic and placed on life support. After doctors diagnosed her, it was decided that only a transmission replacement could save her and Gryphon made the decision to take her off life support.

"She was the most underappreciated member of this team," Gryphon was quoted today as saying. "She faithfully carried five people whose combined weight went well over 1400 lbs all over creation for over a year. Her suspension suffered a lot at the end."

Indeed, one of the more recognizable and crowd-pleasing portions of the Zen Bassmasters' arrival at any geocaching event was the ritual negotiation of the speed bumps. Gryphon reminisces, "I used to get stopped by kids who thought it was cool that we lowered the minivan. I had to tell them it was just from all the weight."

Perhaps the Bassmobile's most lasting legacy was the invention of the "Semi-Circular Course Correction", and her execution of it is still considered by experts to be the most perfect form of this maneuver. "It was like second nature to her. She just seemed to want to turn around. It was like she was born to it."

RIP
2000 Plymouth Grand Voyager
aka "The Bassmobile"
b. May 2003, 42k miles
d. June 2007, 169k miles
At One with the Bait...

Temporary Leave of Absence

2007-05-29T15:57:00.000-07:00

Sorry, I should have posted this earlier instead of making all of you wait wondering where we were.

The blog has been and probably will be on hiatus for a bit. I just finished a huge project at work that took up all my spare time and left me too tired to geocache on the weekends. Then we've had a series of medical issues with various family that has kept me running there, still without caching. The wife's having her gall bladder out on Thursday after many weeks of pain and suffering so that's probably a few more weeks that she's not going to feel up to caching.

So long story short, it may be a bit. If we do anything in the meantime that has good pictures, I'll post them, but for now, don't expect anything and you won't be disappointed.

Sorry to just drop off like this but as a very good friend of mine says often "real life trumps game." Don't worry. We'll be back, eventually, and when we are, I'll write it all up here. I may even have time to hide a couple during my hiatus (oddly enough, my busy schedule and the medical stress has left me too tired to want to hunt caches, but has not dampened my passion for hiding them at all. It's dampened my time, some, but not the desire.)

Until I see you again, Gryphon out.

This Week in Pictures

2007-04-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

We DNF'd geocaching this week but we got a smilie at the Flying Saucer in Nashville.

As promised on our non-caching weeks, we took the camera along for a week in pictures.

Enjoy...

In Absentia

2007-04-02T15:34:00.000-07:00

Hooray! Got my computer back up and running... just in time for the Bassmasters to take an Easter break from caching.

For weeks like this most recent one where we do mostly uneventful micros (albiet 21 of them a ZB record) I'm not going to write a traditional blog since, as I've said before, it's tough to make "it's on a guardrail" funny more than a couple of times.

On the weeks when I do miss blogging, I'm hoping to fill the gaps by giving you one or more noteworthy pictures from the day. Have fun with them. Caption them in the comments section, discuss them freely, photoshop them so that Tserof is wearing a dress. It's all good.

This week, you get Vorin and Tserof at Burger Boy in Winchester during our most recent cache run, doing their best impersonation of Kobayashi by attempting to tackle the One Pounder.

Enjoy!

I Promise, I have a Reason...

2007-03-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know I've been absent. I know I've been negligent. I know I promised a full write-up and haven't delivered. But I have a good reason. Actually, I have two. A nasty case of bronchitis, which makes doing anything but concentrating on breathing laborious and a dead c0mputer. I'm signed in on the wife's box right now to send this, but it's all you get until my new box comes in. This is not my chair, this is not my mouse, this is not my keyboard. I cannot work under these conditions! *stomps away like a diva*

Living in an Island Paradise- The Expurgated Version

2007-03-03T05:36:00.000-08:00

I know some of you are probably looking for a breakdown of Monday's Island Paradise Meet and Greet. Trust me, I plan to give you one... eventually. Be patient and trust me that anything I write now will be short, boring, and probably nonsensical. Lots of reasons for that which I won't get into here other than to say that Martin, Tn. is a LONG bloody way from home (or from anywhere, for that matter)...

Until then, here is the video that Saintseester put together. She did an awesome job with it and I think you'll be pleased.

I'll be back with the full rundown at another time, when I think my mood is such that I can do justice to Saintseester's masterpiece. That time isn't now, though, so check back later.

From the Mouths of Babes

2007-02-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

I don't usually cross-promote here but you have to go check out Saintseester's most recent blog entry where her daughter attempts to explain geocaching for a class project.

http://saintseestersays.saintseester.com/

"Sometimes they're easy and sometimes they're really hard and sometimes there's treasure inside!"

If I had to explain the meaning of life to someone, I'd be hard pressed to do better than that.

I do have to say that I missed the Hot Pink Walking Stick of DOOM!!!

A Ladder and an Apology

2007-02-21T19:09:00.000-08:00

For a week where I've done no caching, it's definitely been an eventful one, so I thought I'd share with you guys since I don't have any silly caching tales for you.

First, an apology. As my wife will tell you, apologies are not something I do often or particularly well. But this one is due...

Over the course of my blogging career, I have poked fun numerous times at Tennessee's reviewer, Maxcacher. Partially as a reviewer and partially as his caching alter ego JoGPS. In truth, I've met Joe a few times at events and he's always been very gracious and kind in answering our hide questions. Still, since he's a good sport, I've played it up, calling him the "Review Nazi" and the Spanish Inquisition. Well, after the experience of submitting my first three hides in Alabama, I have a new nickname for Maxcacher. "The Good Reviewer."

Over the last three weeks, we've hid a bunch of caches. 5 have been submitted in Tennessee, all published without comment or questions (not uncommon as I am known for writing virtual novels in the reviewer notes section, describing the cache type, the hide, the permissions, what I had for dinner, etc). I also submitted three caches in Alabama. That's where I got some perspective.

The first one, Semi-Circular Course Correction, wasn't so bad. I got questioned about putting a cache on a roundabout, traffic levels, etc. No big deal. It was kind of confusingly worded and it was my first cache in Alabama so I expected it. It got published on the second run.

The second cache, Books a Thousand, was supposed to be a dedication to the independent book seller. I mentioned the store it was hid in, Bookmark, once, less to advertise the business than to tell some of the more dense cachers out there (more on dense cachers in a bit) that the cache was within the boundaries of Bookmark's property. Don't wander over to the clothing store next door. It's not there.

As I suspected might be the case, the cache came back as a "Commercial solicitation" cache and I was told to modify it. This happened with our first cache in Tennessee too and just the removal of "go inside and have a cup sometime" was enough to get us by. Not here. To get it within the requested edits, I basically gutted the description down to "it's outside a bookstore. Go get it."

Those of you who have done a lot of my caches have to know how much that bothered me. I pride myself on creative cache descriptions, and have been accused of being too wordy at times. The listing, like the log, is where I feel people should put in lots of effort. I've seen ordinary guardrail caches made special with a good cache listing. I've put 1/1 micros on my list because the listing did something that made me chuckle or learn something. So having a generic cache description is against my better judgement, but at least the reviewer was within the cache listing guidelines. Anyway, it got published. Which brings me to the final Alabama cache.

Barely Legal was supposed to be a cemetery cache just across the state line into Alabama. I placed it both to thumb my nose at the stupid Tennessee law that has made cemetery caches illegal there and to acknowledge the good work being done by the MTGC to have it overturned (and making progress to that end, I might add).

No dice. While caches aren't "illegal" in Alabama, apparently they're on Alabama's reviewer's hit list. First I get the standard "tell me about the cache" e-mail. No problem. I've come to expect the Spanish Inquisition out of Alabama and I understand their concern about people not hiding a cache on top of a grave or something. I wrote back that it was hanging in the back fence of the cemetery, 10-20 feet from the nearest gravestone. Hidden amongst some vines growing within the fence, it wasn't going to be seen by muggles and certainly wasn't going to be mistaken for anything to do with the graveyard. I also mentioned that I had seen numerous other published caches with this same hide.

Big mistake from me. Now our reviewer had her submission guideline to throw at me. The old "another hide isn't precedent for this hide" rule. Fine. You caught me. But tell me where the cache itself violated the rules. What I got back was a) 10-20 feet was too close to a grave for her to feel "comfortable" publishing it because it might be disrespectful and b) some federal law might or might not prohibit cemetery caches. No decision has been made yet, cemetery caches are still being allowed, just not mine. I was told to hide it outside the cemetery, kind of defeating the purpose of a cemetery cache in the first place.

So, we're in a stalemate that I can't win. The cache is in temp archive while our reviewer awaits my word of moving the cache to suit her comfort level. I can't move the cache to suit her, but refuse to archive the cache myself on principle. I could ask for an appeal per the submission rules but I'm a realist. If a disputed cache goes onto the "reviewers forum" for a ruling, I have virtually no shot because a) it's one of their own vs. someone none of them knows squat about and b) she can defend her side on the forum while I can do nothing. No thanks, I'm not that attached to this cache.

So, if you're in the area and want to find the "cache that never was", shoot me an e-mail and I'll send you the coords. I can't give you a smiley, but it'll make me smile if that helps.

Now, on to the second part of my interesting week. The day after "Books a Thousand" got published, I get a DNF from a well-known cacher (who will remain nameless here because I think he likes the attention) in the area that read "wow, it only took one day for cachers to tear up the light fixture."

Needless to say, I got concerned. I couldn't remember any lights nearby that people could get at to destroy but I certainly didn't want the owner of this business, who trusted me enough to let me put a cache on her building, to think that one of us had torn up her lights.

So, I posted something on the Dixiecachers board and my old friend and evil hobbit Cacheburns came to my rescue. The reason I didn't remember the light is because the light in question is about 9 feet off the ground. Now what kind of moron grabs a 2/1 cache listing and thinks "I should get a ladder because this cache is obviously in the light 9 feet off the ground..."

At the time, I was pissed. I print off logs for businesses that let me hide caches so they can see what people are saying about them and build goodwill toward the community. Logs about destruction of property do not build goodwill.

Now, however, I think I am going to print that log off to take to the store owner. She can get a good laugh at it and it might help her decide to move some of her "Easy Reader" books to the front window, the easier to be seen by cachers in need of ladders...

As a final note, our other, "super secret" project is going, well, not swimmingly exactly, but it's treading water nicely. I got back my first "testers" from my partner last night and I think you guys are going to be happy when you see it. I can't say more than that just yet. I want to build suspense and allow you to "draw" your own conclusions...

Until next time...

-Gryphon

AWOL

2007-02-11T16:16:00.000-08:00

I know, it's been a while since I wrote anything here. Hopefully all my readers haven't abandoned me. I have three reasons for my absence, two of which will hopefully correct themselves in the next few weeks.

First, I've gotten a "promotion" at work. I put promotion in quotes because it is more like my job merged with someone else's job and I'm now doing all the work for both. I've been all over the state the last few weeks and haven't had much time to blog.

Second, we've mainly been doing urban micros lately due to a few of us not responding well to the cold and there's only so many ways you can make "it was a key hider under a lamp" funny or interesting. Granted, not being funny or interesting has never stopped me before, but you get the drift.

Third, and this is the part that I hope will make the delays worthwhile for you, a couple of Zen Bassmasters have been working on a new, top secret project that I'm really excited about and I hope you will be too. It's still geocaching related (and very related to this blog, at least initially) and will hopefully allow the Zen Bassmasters' peculiar form of mediocrity to take a new form of media by storm, or at least by scattered shower with an occasional thunderburst....

I promise you that you guys will be the first to hear about this new project as soon as it's ready. I just don't want to talk too much about it yet because it's a new realm for me (but not, fortunately, for the person working on it with me) and I want to make sure I don't screw it up before I send it out to the world.

Stay tuned...

Journey Into the Heart of Mordor

2007-01-28T07:14:00.000-08:00

Every so often, things just come together. The stars align, the auras are fluffy, and all just falls into place. Fortunately, this was the case for the first joint event from the Zen Bassmasters and the Fellowship of the Bling. We, along with the evil hobbit Cacheburns, had been planning this event for ages and at every step there seemed to be peril. The forecast was for cold, possible rain, and maybe even snow. Most of our MTGC pals had other commitments and couldn't make it, a large number of our Dixiecacher regulars were on the fence about whether they could attend or not until the day of the event, one of the Zen Bassmasters had just been diagnosed with a heel spur, another was just recovering from a severe ear infection, and two had gotten oral surgery that week. It seemed like the signs were all against us. We worried that no one at all would show up for the event and we'd be left to wander the caches of Well's Hill Park by ourselves (which, as Vorin rightly pointed out, is not really much of an event since we've done these caches 6 times now).

But all the worrying was for naught. As we prepared to meet Vorin and Mad Mike in the Zen Bassmaster "ready room", aka the Elk River Coffee Shop, to fortify our sick selves with caffeine and painkillers and to plan out the day, I began to get a flood of e-mail from the fence-sitters confirming their attendance. Saintseester, check. Cyrusel, check. Alabama Rambler, check. Things were looking up.

The Bassmasters arrived at the coffee shop and got ourselves caffeinated and then looked around and noticed that Tserof was missing. So we began what has become an almost weekly tradition for us. Calling Tserof 26 times until he wakes up and answers his phone. Now understand that I am not exaggerating much when I say that we call Tserof 26 times. Tserof could sleep through a Megadeth concert in his living room (more on that later) and it usually takes about that many times for us to a) be heard over his alarm that has been beeping unheeded for an hour and b) to make him finally realize that the Deadwood theme music he's hearing isn't a dream but a phone call from his annoyed teammates. We've got to work on getting that boy a curfew on the day before cache day.

Once we got Tserof awake and at the rendezvous point, we headed to Well's Hill Park to meet up with our event Co-coordinator Cacheburns. We began working out our plan to divide into groups and our other plan for Tserof, who wasn't interested in walking 3.5 miles today, when Keymaker and Vesole drove up, over an hour early. Greetings were made and I immediately began an attempt to lull them into a stupor with my boring caching tales so they wouldn't see the preparation going on behind me. Unfortunately, Keymaker has extensive experience caching with the Fellowship and displays a surprising immunity to being bored into a stupor with caching tales. Must be all those events with Toids. Sure enough, he immediately catches on when Cacheburns, Mad Mike, and Tserof leave in Tserof's truck and only Cacheburns and Mad Mike come back, a full hour later, without the truck or Tserof. He is suspicious so I have to come up with a story on the fly. It was like an episode of Whose Line is it Anyway as I attempted to not outright lie but to still conceal the nature of our work. I maintained that Tserof had been given the duty of "distributing water", which was technically true, and that his truck had been left by the crossroads to hold drinking water, which was definitely true. Keymaker couldn't understand why it took them an hour to drive halfway down the trail and walk back. For that I didn't have a good answer so I did what any good friend in a bad situation would do, I threw the hot potato to Vorin who caught it like a Division IV-B Freshman Wide Receiver and mumbled something about them doing "trail maintenance."

Why the secrecy? Because we were trying to hide the fact that Tserof was going to be stationed at the top of the main waterfall with a cache of water balloons to throw down as people showed up. He was instructed to grunt, growl, and act like a cave troll. As you'll see in a bit, this worked with limited success.

Finally they got back and we began the event in earnest. I gave a short presentation of the "real" history of Well's Hill Park, which was home to the nation's first gravity-feed city water system way back in 1892. Cacheburns then took over and gave a little speech about the history of the Zen Bassmasters/Fellowship feud. We then broke up into five groups to begin the tour of Mordor.

The five groups were each led by either a Zen Bassmaster or a Hobbit. The groups were Team White & Nerdy, led by Ashlynne, Team Warrior Clan, led by Mad Mike, Team Cacheburns, led by Cacheburns (wonderful creative name there, bud), a team led by Vorin which I never got a name for and so will heretofore be known as Team &, and my team, Team Shortbus, so named because we were the self-styled "remedial" team.

I didn't do a very good job of getting the names of who was one everyone's team so forgive me for that. Hopefully some of the others will post comments with their team rosters. Team Shortbus consisted of Saintseester, RN2B, Neoncacher, Eeeeee, Cheezehead, Where'sDib, Tasia, and our "shortbus driver", Rick618.

My team immediately became concerned as we walked toward the caches as they noticed that they had the only guide who didn't have a GPSr. There's only one in our household and the wife was using it. Not to worry, I said. I don't need no stinking GPS. Famous last words.

Rick618, being a noted Hobbit sympathizer, was immediately suspicious of everything (having spent too much time hanging out with duplicitous hobbit-y folk) and quizzed me mercilessly. He should have been a private detective as he quickly picked up on several clues that others missed. Where was Tserof? When I told him he was "distributing water", he didn't believe me. He noted that the event page mentioned at least five times that "you'll get wet" which he thought was overkill for stepping in some puddles and insisted that we were "laying traps somewhere". I tried to play innocent, knowing that our first scheduled cache was "Trolling for Trouble" which was the one where we had Tserof and the water balloons posted. He wasn't buying.

As we headed up the path toward Trolling for Trouble, I reverted to typical Zen Bassmasters behavior and got us on the wrong path. About halfway up it Neoncacher keeps insisting that we're moving away from Trolling. Sure enough, I took a right where I should have taken the straight path and had inadvertantly led us to "Seduce the Spider." Rick and Neoncacher made plenty of disparaging remarks about the quality of their guide as I tried to play it off as "all part of the act to give you the full Zen Bassmasters experience." While this is going on my "embedded reporter" Saintseester was recording everything on her camera for posterity.

Not much to say about Seduce the Spider. It's probably one of the two tougher climbs in the park so we sent our ringers, Rick, Neoncacher, Eeeee, and Cheezehead while the rest of us stood at the bottom and yelled up encouragement, or something like that.

From there I got us back on track and we headed for Trolling for Trouble. A few hundred feet away, Rick spots a massive, unmoving person-shaped thing on top of the falls. He is immediately suspicious. I try to play it off as a local until we get closer. RN2B notices it isn't moving at all and thinks we've put a scarecrow up there as part of the show. As we get a bit closer, she sees it's Tserof, but he's not moving at all. Sounds of light snoring travel down to us, echoing off the walls of the ampitheatre. Our "surprise" cave troll was asleep on the job. I try to make the save and start screaming in as loud a voice as possible "OH YEAH! THAT'S OUR PET CAVE TROLL FLUFFY! HI FLUFFY! GREET EVERYONE FLUFFY!" Finally, after I yell myself hoarse and our "scary surprise" has the team in fits of laughter, Tserof wakes up and remembers he's supposed to be working. He stands up, bellows, and throws the water balloons. About half don't break... Neoncacher officially becomes my favorite person of the day as he grabs one of the unbroken ones and returns fire, bouncing the still unbroken balloon off Tserof's chest. While he keeps the troll busy, Cheezehead scrambles up and gets the cache. We marvel at the beauty of the waterfall (pictures of which are available in previous blogs I believe) and begin our climb down. Dib develops a fear of falling at this point and is moving at roughly the pace of a dead snail. And for good reason as, just as I'm trying to tell him it's perfectly safe, Tasia slips and plants her seat directly into the cold water. She breaks a nail doing this, which ends up being the most serious injury of the day at the event (more on that later).

Before I move on to more Team Shortbus adventures, let me tell you some of what I heard from the other teams' encounter with the cave troll. Lewtercris, who was on Team &, got the worst of the splashing, as Tserof went to school with her and thought he could aim straight for her with no reprecussions. He was wrong as our team met that team, including a soaked Lewtercris, coming out and she walked up to me and said "Jason USED to be my friend..." and stalked away. But the worst cave troll incident of the day came from Team Warrior Clan as Tserof threw a water balloon straight at Cyrusel's seven year old daughter. The combination of the stressful climb, the bellowing fat "troll" at the top, and being pegged with water balloons was too much for the little thing and she began to cry. It got worse when Cyrusel picked her up to move her out of the line of fire... and set her down directly in a sink of mud up to her knees. Cyrusel's son helpfully declared it "quicksand" which didn't do much for the poor girl's state of mind. Fortunately, it had a good resolution as the "cave troll" yelled down apologies to the poor girl (as well he should) and she yelled up "I forgive you" as her mom led her out of the fire zone.

Team Shortbus was then supposed to move on to Shelob and the Cave Troll. But once again, their guide got turned around and we ended up at Nazgul's Nest. This is a pretty nasty climb as well (cacheburns route plan for the remedial team somehow had all the 4 terrain caches first. Coincidence? I think not) so we sent, I believe, Eeeeee and Cheezehead up for this one. Let me say here that, when they're well behaved as Cheezehead was, kids are awesome to cache with. They can climb things you wouldn't dream of climbing, balance on things that would break under you, and get their hands in holes that your fingers won't go in. He was a great help. Eeeeee, you got a good kid there.

We then moved on back to Shelob. Dibs and Saintseester didn't want to risk the climb to this one so I sneakily suggested they go sit right under a specific tree (where the final of the multi was) and the rest of us went up. Well, Rick, Neon, Eeeee, and Cheezehead went up. RN2B, Tasia, and myself stood at the halfway point and "supervised" them. When they got to the top Rick yells down "I thought this one was a multi". Apparently some members of Team & had gotten to the cache before us and proceeded to sign the paper containing the final coords... The only other thing of interest here was that we met Team & before we did this and brand new cacher Flyinggranny told us "You guys should be warned. Your UPS is useless back there." Many jokes were made for the rest of the day about the lack of overnight delivery services in brown trucks in Mordor (which is not technically true. Mordor uses the Black Rider Pony Express delivery service, whose motto is "when you absolutely, positively, have to have it before the Dark Lord's rise).

From here Rick had given up on my leadership and was trying to get the team to go find Mortality, which he showed as closer than Underground Railroad TB Hotwl. I insisted that I actually knew where all of the main trail caches were (which turned out to be not entirely true, more on that later) and that Mortality was on the way out so we should hit the back side caches first. They finally see the wisdom of this and we move on. The TB Hotel was an easy enough find. Unfortunately, a little kid muggle saw us putting it back and when another group went after it the contents had been dumped and the box taken. Little thieving bastard...

From there we went to get the first part of my Underground Railroad multi. Unfortunately, despite the fact that the cache is mine, I had forgotten where the first stage was hidden. I tried to pass it off as being mysterious, even attempting to barter the answer to California Frustration out of Rick for the answer to this cache, but Neoncacher found it before I could complete the barter.

From there we found the last part of Vorin's "Wells Hill Park" multi. At this point, Dibs is looking a bit peaked and I, knowing all too well the signs of someone not used to hiking who has pushed himself too far, begin to get worried. But Dibs was a trooper and made it out fine.

Our final two caches were Mortality and the end of Underground Railroad. Not much to report on these. Fairly easy finds. We walked back to the cars, tired but feeling accomplished. Turns out we were one of the few groups who didn't skip at least one cache. Not bad for the remedial team.

From there, everyone adjourned to La Fuente restaurant for good food and some awards presentations. We gave out the following awards;

Cave Troll Target- to Neoncacher for firing back and Lewtercris for getting wettest. We would have unanimously given this to Cyrusel's daughter but they didn't make it to the dinner. Neoncacher got an umbrella with a target painted on it and Lewtercris got an umbrella and poncho.

Pigpen Award- to Dibs, who was the only cacher to get dirty enough to have to change part of his clothes before the dinner. A dry day made all the difference here as the Zen Bassmasters trip in the rain last week had us all coming out looking like Al Jolson singing "Mammy". Got soap on a rope, homemade by my wife, Ashlynne.

Blind Man's Bluff- Given to Alabama Rambler who was veered away at the last minute from trekking down a steep ravine in search of a cache that was 15 feet in the other directions. Given a blindfold and earplugs.

Vorin's Red Badge of Courage- given to Tasia, who suffered the worst "injury" of the day, breaking a nail. She got a first aid kit. We also gave Saintseester an honorable mention and a flashlight for breaking a very expensive looking camera lens.

Awards were also given to Flyinggranny and Lewtercris for being our newest cachers, and an award to Last Chance for being the cacher with the most finds.

We also gave a special "honorary Zen Bassmaster" award to RN2B, for excellence in hiding caches that stupid people like the Zen Bassmasters can find. She got a Zen Bassmasters t-shirt.

Then it was our turn to be surprised as Rick618 had LOTR themed toys to hand out to each of us. Cacheburns got a "birthday Bilbo" toy, I got a talking Smeagol, and we got a communal One Ring to share amongst ourselves.

All in all a great event. We had fun, everyone else seemed to have fun, and we brought some people to Lincoln County who had never been before. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as much as we did.

Until next time, from Mordor, the land of milk and honey...

-Gryph

These Are the Caches in Your Neighborhood

2007-01-09T17:37:00.000-08:00

Howdy. It's been a while. The holidays played havoc with our caching schedule but this week we're back in the saddle again. This week, Mad Mike couldn't join us and Tserof had to work until noon so we decided to do some caches close to home. Surprisingly, we hadn't cleaned out Lincoln County completely so we had those on the list as well as a few in the north Alabama area.

We also had another reason for this week's trip. After scrimping, saving, and begging every relative we have for Christmas cash, Ashlynne and I finally managed to buy our own GPS. And just in time for my business trip to Jackson, Tn at the end of the month. Anyone know some good caches in that area? We had planned to get a Magellan 400 since we figured that's all our budget would afford but we managed to find a Magellan 500 bundled with topo software at Costco for $179 so we grabbed it.

The soundtrack for this week is "Ramones Mania!" by The Ramones.

Since Tserof was working, Fish met Ashlynne and I early to hit a couple of the Lincoln County caches that he hasn't gotten. Now, before I get into the week's caching, I have to tell you that Fish will no longer be known as Fish in the blog. Fish, who has been Fish as long as I've known him, has asked that I begin referring to him by his GC.com name, Vorin. I guess he doesn't think he's getting the riches and notoriety of the rest of the Bassmasters, due to confusion over his name. *looks about for the fame and notoriety* Or maybe he's going through a mid-life crisis. In any case, I am nothing if not accommodating, so please take note that Fish is now Vorin, aka "The Geocacher Formerly Known as Fish" or, as he likes to be known to his friends, "&". It's all good, so long as he doesn't start asking me to call him V-Diddy.

Anyway, Vorin wasn't with us when our group did Froglegz's caches so we took him around to do those. These caches are detailed in another blog so if you haven't read about them, skip down a few pages. We hit Elk River Access #1, #2, and #3 as well as Cowley Bridge Cache, which is one of my favorites in Lincoln County. Vorin was appropriately impressed and I used the Cowley Bridge cache to drop off a travel bug looking for good fishing spots (as this most certainly is) and pick up a Night Caching coin.

From there, we headed back to pick up Tserof. Our next cache was Fish Hatchery Rest Area. This is a fairly recent cache, set out by Wildthing73. I had thought about putting a cache out here, but Wildthing beat me to it. Not too much to say about this cache. Fairly standard micro hide. We found it without much trouble. I did take note of the wooded area nearby though, as I have a cache hide in mind that is looking for some woods to live in. These may be the ones.

Next up was Hwy 64 TB Rest Area, which promised not one but two Green Jeep TB. I can't remember much about the cache hide itself, as we did a bunch of them this week and they've all begun to run together in my little brain. I left a TB I had with me and took the Jeep, which I have plans for. More on that later...

Our next cache was Chrysalis, by noted hobbit sympathizer Rick618. This one was a hard hide for us. The GPS led us to the wrong spot and I was determined that Rick was just the evil kind of person who would hide a micro in the kudzu-coated tree and so picked over every leaf looking for it. As always, we over-analyzed the cache name, the clue, and the logs, looking for any idea of Rick's evil machinations (we were flashing back to his satanic "16" cache a few weeks ago). In the end, as usual, the cache was right under our noses. Well hidden, but not enough that we shouldn't have been able to get it. Apparently, these hobbits have studied us and found our weakness... easy caches. We must get better at being bad...

Next up was Circa 1950's, which is an old Highway Patrol building. This is another cache where it was right in front of our faces, we even put our hands next to it several times, but we missed it completely. It just happened as we were about to give up that I saw it right out in front of us and grabbed it. For those of you fearing that we might get good at this and the blog might get boring, never fear. The blog may get boring because I'm nearly too tired to write these days, but it won't get boring because we've gotten good. Anything but, I'm afraid...

Next was a set of three caches in a series called "Cappy's Park." The park gave us some fits as we consistently drove into the wrong entrance, through the wrong gate, and down the wrong path. Tserof, driving his Titan today, made numerous "semi-circular course corrections" while Vorin attempted to navigate. Not a lot to say about these caches beyond that. Fairly easy micros. Evidently getting to them is the hard part...

Next up was Spelce Landing. This one may not be a cache much longer as it's right smack in the middle of the area where they're working on widening Hwy 64. In fact, Tserof had to ignore the orange barrels telling us not to enter the work area to even get to the cache. Hey, what's a little law breaking among friends. Again, not a terribly hard cache but a nice one in a nice spot. Be a shame if the construction ate this one.

Our next cache is Gone to the Dogs. We were a little apprehensive about this one since it's on private land and the logs said it was pretty difficult. There were several DNF from cachers much better than us. As we pulled up, the owner was outside on a go-cart and came driving over. We hoped that the person who placed the cache really had gotten permission. Sure enough, the first thing the owner asked was if we were geocachers. He told us that "it must be real hard to find. I don't even know where it is but lots of people come look for it and hardly anyone finds it..." He didn't even get half of this sentence out before Vorin came up with the cache. The property owner was amazed and declared us "really good". He don't know us very well. These tough caches we can do but give us a lampskirt micro, and we're stumped...

Next was Green Water. This was a Cacheburns cache and it showed (although we later discovered that it had been muggled). Thorns were everywhere and both Vorin and I donated the required blood to the caching day. It was also quite wet and we all got soaked feet. The denizens of Mordor hate wet feet...

Our next cache was Tea Snob. This was another urban micro that gave us fits. To be fair to us, it was a really good hide but it's still embarassing to nearly DNF an urban micro. But Vorin eventually found it and we moved on.

Our final cache of the day was Holy Cache. Holy Cache is the oldest cache in Lincoln County, having been put out in 2002, but somehow we always managed to miss it. Too bad for us, as it's a really neat cache. The log's full and we've been told the people who hid it don't cache anymore so we may try to contact them and see about adopting it. If you haven't done this cache yet, go do it. Cool hide and pretty historic as old as it is.

That's it for the day, cache-wise. 12 for us and 16 for &. I think that may be a record.

From there, Mad Mike joined us and we headed over to the Elk River Coffee shop to meet up with our mortal enemy, Cacheburns, about a kind of "cold war" co-event we're planning. I can tell you that, if this event goes off like we plan it to, it's going to be a good one. Don't miss it if you can make it by at all. The event is here.

I'm hoping all our friends and nemeses can come. We've spent a lot of time populating Well's Hill Park with caches and we'd like to show them off. We've got a whole Lord of the Rings theme going and people coming for the hike will be tour guided by either a Zen Bassmaster or an evil hobbit. From there we'll be headed to the Zen Bassmasters' favorite hang-out, La Fuente Mexican restaurant.

No blog next week as we're forgoing caching to spend some time out at Well's Hill and make sure all of our guides actually know where we're going. Come see us on the 27th at 11:00 am and hike with us. We'll have high impact groups and low impact groups so no one has to feel bad about being a little slower than our "pro" hikers. I will personally be leading one group and anyone who's cached with me knows how slow I walk.

Until next time...

Year in Review Part 1: The Quotes

2006-12-28T05:59:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I did an entry for you guys and I'm sure some of you are feeling a bit neglected. The holidays have done a mischief on our caching schedule. But we're back to it this weekend so expect an update then. Until then, hopefully this will suffice. I decided to go back through the archives and do a "year in review" post, well, more like a "seven months in review" since we just started it in June. I hope to have a "Year in Pictures" up to accompany this one soon. Ashlynne and I just have to find time to weed through the hundreds of photos we've taken while caching and find which ones to feature. For now, you get the best (and worst) things heard on the caching trail in 2006. Enjoy!

"How hard can it be? Buy a GPS, look up coordinates online, and go find them. Piece of cake!"
-Gryphon, in his now "famous last words" before encountering Monte Sano for the first time

"Damn hobbits!"
-The entire group, almost weekly

"You notice Frodo was always falling down in those movies? No wonder..."
-Tserof, attempting to explain the weird hobbit terrain rating system

"Over rocks, under trees. One time both over and under a tree at the same time"
-Gryphon, describing the climb to Bling

"Gravity. Always keeping the fat man down..."
-Mad Mike, master philosopher, on the nature of hills

"This can't end well..."
-Gryphon, spoken every time someone gives Ashlynne the GPS

"There are mountains in Alabama?"
-Gryphon, who failed geography in high school

"Tserof kept pointing out that the listing said we has permission, but we felt that would be little consolation if they felt bad when they found the GPS on our bodies."
-The Zen Bassmasters, on property rights

"The Chapel Hill Park consists of a paved area about the size of a cubicle, one tree, and two picnic tables"
-Gryphon, describing Chapel Hill's "thriving nature scene"

"With Chapel Hill weddings, the whole bride's family/groom's family thing kind of overlaps..."
-Gryphon, a Unionville native, getting a cheap dig in on the residents of Chapel Hill

"If anyone would know about Quercus Coccinea, it'd be you, Tserof..."
-Gryphon, referring to Tserof's questionable sexuality

"Of course I do! I'm Dr. Dendrology!"
-Tserof, who suffers from delusions of grandeur

"Dr. Dumbass, more like..."
-Mad Mike, bringing it back to reality

"Fish, stop tapping my ass!"
-Tserof, did I mention we question his sexuality?

"He looked like Elton John had been tapped to play James Bond. All he needed was a license to accessorize."
-Gryphon, describing Little Vorin in his sunglasses and water pistol

"Contained inside was a child of the 80's version of the Holy Grail"
-Gryphon, describing his and Mad Mike's joy at finding "Zamfir: Master of the Pan Flute" in one of our caches

"He got overtaken by Kenny G in the 90's for the "music to put you to sleep" crowd."
-Mad Mike, explaining why Zamfir was unknown to the youngsters in the group

"we soon decided it was badgers. Large, scary badgers..."
-The Zen Bassmasters, speculating on the fauna native to Percy Priest Lake

"he looked like he'd had his legs shaved by OJ Simpson..."
-Gryphon, commenting on Fish's lost battle with the briars

"A bit of a climb..."
-Rick618's hardly adequate description of the 3 miles of hell that is Green Mtn.

"I think Frodo may have felt sorry for us, leading us to an easy cache so we can go to our deaths with a feeling of accomplishment."
-Gryphon, questioning Frodo's motives before our Jolly Green Walk to Hell

"Ashlynne is from New York, a place so frigid the only reptile that can survive there is Senator Hillary Clinton."
-Gryphon, explaining Ash's non-recognition of a rattlesnake rattle

"we looked like crack addicts on free needle day."
-Gryphon, describing the Bassmasters heading for water after Jolly Green

"This shit right here is some good shit. You never know how good water tastes until something like this. I'm telling you. This is the best stuff ever right here. I can't believe I don't drink it more. I love water."
-Tserof, joining the cult of cold water

"You wouldn't think something this small would work so well."
-Tserof, repeating his girlfriend's favorite phrase, in description of a personal fan

"They're your family. That means you have to ride with them..."
-Judas, aka Fish, dooming me to kiddie music hell

"Little bunny Foo Foo is a right bastard if you're a field mouse."
-Gryphon, on the psychoses of children's music heroes

"The wheels on the bus go round and round but no matter how much you beg, the bus will not back up and run you over, ending your misery."
-Gryphon, seeking a "final exit" from kiddie music hell

"Semi-circular course correction."
-Fish's attempt to make our constant turning around sound less retarded

"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."
-Gryphon, describing the Bassmasters admittedly lax training requirements for a personal nurse

"Not now, Cali"
-Tserof, in sleepy response to Ashlynne's attempts to wake him up

"Tserof's ghetto princess"
-Gryphon, describing Tserof's, er, "relationship" to the afore mentioned

"That's certainly not something he's ever said in real life..."
-Mad Mike, making an astute observation on Tserof's sleepy quote

"Man titties abounded and pasty white flesh was on display. Not a pretty thing."
-Gryphon, on the Bassmasters taking their shirts off to wring water out of them

"Do I go right?"
"Yeah... Sort of..."
-Tserof & Fish, in a fairly typical display of our navigational skills

"Our adventure in geocaching was complete. We'd spent a full eight hours traveling around and having a good time--I'm deeply thankful for the chance to spend time with Tserof, Fish and Chri, and glad to have experienced again this remarkable hobby of theirs. Every cache we found had the weight of history, the lingering touch of other human hands, their works and skill made substantial before our very eyes. It's a type of history you can see and feel and know where it's been and follow where it's going. Real people came before, and real people will come after, and they will see the names and wonder who those people were... but they will KNOW why they were there."
-Doc, proving why he's by far the better writer of the two of us

"It's right here, Tserof. Here. Here. It's back there..."
-Mad Mike, in another example of our team's navigational prowess

"It makes for good blogging..."
-Mad Mike's excuse for anything stupid the team does

"it's a wagon trail..."
-Rick618's inadequate description of the Bushwhacker Johnston Trail

"I'd hate to be riding in the wagon that is on this trail..."
-Mad Mike, more accurately describing the trail

"How do you shut a Zen Bassmaster up? Send him uphill."
-Mad Mike, making a joke

"Aside from the fact that I will never again feel joy, I don't think this hike had any effect on me at all..."
-Gryphon, after the Bushwhacker Johnston experience

"Hilarity ensues"
-Gryphon, describing what usually happens when we try to geocache

Micro Madness

2006-12-08T17:18:00.000-08:00

Yeah, yeah. I know. Been a couple of weeks since I've had much to say on here. Between the holidays and hiding our own caches the last few weeks, we haven't gotten much geocaching done. Unfortunately, that trend plans to continue as everyone is booked solid through the holidays. So don't expect much action on the blog the next few weeks, although if things go as planned, I may have a funny newbie story or two before the end of the year.

Due to a rash of sickness and injury throughout the group, we asked Fish, our trip planner extraordinaire, to do us a list of low-impact caches. We have intentionally avoided most urban micros in the Huntsville area thus far because they really aren't our bag, so we decided this would be as good a week as any to do the micros.

Fish, heeding my mantra of "hard caches make good blog", added a couple of higher difficulty micros to the list, just to spice things up.

Our first cache of the day was "Just Another Cache in the Wall" which promised a little bit of history, and a decent hide. Sure enough, the coordinates took us to a rock wall beside a gas station. The sign by the wall told that this was the only remaining part of some famous person from Huntsville's history.

I saw a rock wall and cringed. I hate rock wall micros. 4 zillion nooks and crannies to stick something and it usually means me spending an hour tugging on rocks that look slightly out of place. This was no exception. We poked and pulled on rocks and tugged on sticks and scoured metal signs for any indication of a pico. We looked over the clue with great care to see if it was hiding something from us. We even went inside as the clue suggested but found no caches or no clues in the Bud Lights (although we did find Stewart's Diet Orange Cream Soda, which was awesome). Eventually, the rest of us were ready to give up but Fish, who is much more anal about these kinds of things than the rest of us wasn't finished. In fact, he wanted the cache so badly, he was willing to commit the only sin that will get you banished to Hell in Zen Bassmaster-land...

He asked a hobbit for help...

Yes, you read that right. No amount of genuflection or "Hail Zebco" will get him out of this sin. He actually got on the phone and called Bilbo for assistance. The rest of us moved a few steps away from him, afraid to catch whatever midget-loving disease he'd gotten from cavorting with the hobbits last week.

Long story short, Fish found the cache with, ech, the help of Bilbo and we moved on. I feel dirty just logging this find...

Our second cache was another run at "Dead Children's Playground." Once again, mini-muggles stood in our way and we vowed to come back a little later, hoping the impending Christmas parade would pique their interest (and not strand us).

Next up was what Fish said was our "difficult" cache, one of Rick618's called California Frustration. And it was aptly named...

The clue promised that there were "16 possible hiding places" for the cache. We immediately noticed that the pavilion had 16 posts and set to locate it there... No luck.

Then we noticed the legs and supports on the tables also numbered 16. So that's it! We looked, but no cache. Then we noticed that the legs on the swingset and the swings also equalled 16... This was like the friggin' Da Vinci Code! Unfortunately, Fish's "phone a friend" list contains only Hobbit names and not Tom Hanks so we were out of luck. Fish offered to call Bilbo again but we threatened an intervention and he thought better of it.

Honestly, we looked over every conceivable 16 thing in that entire park, and there were a bunch. Well, every one but the one that had the cache... Finally we logged it as a DNF and moved on, for fear of the approaching parade catching us.

Back to Dead Children's Playground where there were, finally, no children present, dead or otherwise. The description said the coords were written "somewhere among the playground equipment." Well, it was "somewhere", if you use the term loosely. And it was "among the playground equipment", also used loosely. After a ton of even more Da Vinci Code-esque attempts to decrypt the graffiti on the slide ("It says Joanie Loves Chachi 2005! There are 5 letters in Joanie! That might be a clue!) and one very humorous climb by Fish into one piece of playground equipment that nearly took a can of Crisco to get him out of (and you better believe we'd have "phoned a friend" to Bilbo for that particular job!), we finally located the coords and headed to the cache.

Next up was "Well now THAT'S Original" which is just what it promised, a lampskirt micro by the Space and Rocket Center. Being a huge space mark, I loved just going there. Nothing to say about the cache. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, "If you enjoy this sort of thing, then this is the sort of thing you'll enjoy..."

Next up was Campus Code Blue. Another easy micro on the UAH Campus. Nothing much to say here other than we nearly got mobbed by the ducks nearby.

From this point, Fish decided to "go off the book" and just find the nearest cache in the GPS. It happened to be Watching the Winds Change. Not too difficult to find, although not having a clue or logs made it slightly more difficult.

At that point, we decided to head home as my bronchitis was acting up and we were all pretty tired.

Again, not the longest or the most interesting of posts but they were urban micros so what did you expect?

Assuming our "12 Caches of Christmas" plan comes off, I should have a better story for you in a couple of weeks. If not, I'll see you again after the new year.

Until then...

-Gryph

Spirit of the Holidays

2006-11-25T19:34:00.000-08:00

First off, this is going to be a pretty short entry this week because, frankly, I'm sick as a dog and missed about half the trip. For the record, don't geocache with bronchitis. Bad idea...

This week, we're doing a little more cache placing at Well's Hill Park. If you've been monitoring your weekly cache notifications, you've seen that there's been a flurry of activity in Lincoln County recently as the Zen Bassmasters (including new Bassmaster Froglegz) have taken it upon themselves to make Lincoln County a place worth coming to for geocachers. We've more than quadrupled the previous number of caches in the area (2 before we began placing) so if you've been looking for some virgin area to cache in, come here in a week or two when we get the last of the caches up. It'll be worth your time.

The main reason I wanted to get this week's entry, however short, in is to commemorate an extremely rare occasion. You've all heard the stories of the holiday spirit filling people from different, often warring backgrounds, who come together just once to break bread and share stories. From the pilgrims and indians at Thanksgiving to the warring armies singing christmas carols to each other across their trenches, it's all over the place, and it's all very nice.

But they ain't got nothing on us...

Don't believe me? Just take a look at this picture.

Yes, that is indeed the evil hobbit Bilbo pictured with our own Fish. No, we haven't taken up with the filthy little hairfoots and no we haven't given up our war to eradicate Middle Earth (or at least Northern Alabama) of their evil. But he did ask nicely for some help in locating a couple of our challenges and, in the spirit of the holidays, we decided to bring him along. Besides, we thought, if he fell to his death doing one of them, wouldn't it be better for us to be there to witness it, rather than just have to hear about it from others. Hooray!

Little did we know that Bilbo had hidden some caches of his own earlier in the week and had similar plans for us. Very interesting...

Again, not much to tell here. We found Bilbo's first cache easily enough and he had a good deal more trouble than we expected from one of my as-yet unpublished ones. Guess I need to bump the difficulty on that one a bit.

We walked on a bit more and watched Bilbo and Ashlynne both go after Mordor's Gauntlet #4: The Corrupted Dwarf. Both nearly fell but they located it eventually. No hobbity death for us today.

Beyond that... I can't really tell you. All I remember is a haze of burning lungs and hacking coughs. "You've got bronchitis?", Bilbo asked me. "What the hell are you doing out here today? Just when I thought you guys were getting smarter..."

I remember taking a travel bug to our "Underground Railroad TB Hotel" and dropping it off and then nearly dropping myself. Finally, I had to admit defeat and head back alone while the others went on. Hopefully Fish or Ashlynne will be willing to blog up the rest of the day. Heck, I'd even put up a blog from Bilbo. I'm such a whore...

I will leave you with the picture of one of our waterfall caches. These are absolutely beautiful caches (and another was found today so expect more). They're pretty hefty finds (unlike the hobbits, we rate our terrain fairly and these are legit 4s). But even if you don't attempt the caches, it's worth heading up the path to see them. We were bowled over since, a month ago, only a few of us knew this park existed and none of us knew about the waterfalls. So I leave you, for now, with those. Enjoy.

Monte Sano Strikes Back, Part 2

2006-11-20T18:11:00.000-08:00

Well, as you have read in our last post, we made it to the bottom of the mountain, to Bushwhacker Johnston's trail, and were pretty proud of our successes. Tired, hurt, but proud. Of course, our victory was short-lived. We were down, but our cars were up. Uh oh...

Up... Such a small word for such a lot of pain. Old man gravity keeping us down again. Considering how much pain we were feeling from the trip down, I didn't feel terribly confident about our chances.

Fish, Mike, and I started up while the others were finishing off the last cache. We figured if we got ahead of them, we might gets a good deal of the way up before they caught us. We began to wonder if maybe we should have bugged out when Saintseester did, saving ourselves this embarrassment. But we're Zen Bassmasters. We can't take the easy way out, or even the moderately difficult way out. Nope. We've been challenged by the hobbits and we just have to do it the hardest way possible.

Unfortunately, nature decided to move the definition of "hard" a little to the right...

I wish I had some funny anecdotes or witty things to say about the trip up but, honestly, I don't. I don't really remember most of it. I know it hurt. A lot. The only thing that kept it from hurting more than the Jolly Green Debacle was the temperature. I remember cursing Rick mightily, using many of the same curses we used on the Jolly Green trail (did I mention we never learn?). I remember Fish being very possessive of one of the benches. I remember telling Fish I wasn't going to sit down because my muscles would stiffen up if I sat. I remember fighting Fish for the next bench down. I remember being caught and passed by the evil hobbit sympathizers, who seemed amused by our plight. I remember children who were running and skipping on the way down now plodding past us with dour looks on their faces. I remember Stephanie catching up to me and keeping pace with me, happy to find someone else who was having problems with the climb. Mostly, I remember pain. Pain in my legs and pain in my feet and pain in my back and pain in places that I can't mention on the blog.

Pain... But eventually, we began to hear cars, then see cars, then finally we see the little bridge just down from the parking lot. I can tell you that I've never loved a bridge so much in my life. If I weren't already married, I'd have proposed to that bridge. It's a wonderful bridge...

And finally, we make it out to the parking lot. The afore mentioned children are lying on the ground like they're dying. I feel like doing the same but I'm not sure I'll ever get up again if I do.

After some more time spent cursing Rick and saying our goodbyes to Stephanie, Taz, Parrgolf, and all the other dupes, er, "folks" who joined us on this adventure, we headed out to Beauregards to conquer the all you can eat chicken wings and lick our wounds.

I don't know if this one counts as a victory over the hobbity types or not. On the one hand, we met their challenge and we passed it. We walked right into their plan to kill us and came out alive. On the other hand, we suffered some injuries. Physical injuries and psychological injuries. Fish has already said no more hike events for him, at least for a while. And I tend to agree. We do this to lose weight and get into shape and, honestly, this hurt us enough to seriously hinder our walking regimen during the week.

So I guess we call this one a tie. But don't worry. We've already got a few thing planned for our hobbit-y friends to turn the battle back in our favor. Stay tuned...

-Gryph

Monte Sano Strikes Back- Part 1

2006-11-14T17:32:00.000-08:00

In our last few editions, you've got to join us in celebrating our defeat of our old nemeses, the hobbits and the evil mountain they call their home, Monte Sano. But you knew it couldn't end there, right? Of course not. Like every demonically possessed horror movie franchisee in history, Monte Sano rose from certain death to terrorize again.

Actually, it was completely our fault. Someone once said "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity." We just call it The Zen Bassmaster Way.

All this began several weeks ago at the Finger Lickin' Chicken event. We were talking to noted hobbit sympathizer Rick618, who mentioned that he had a hike event planned on November 11. We talked to him about it and it sounded interesting enough. Civil War history, a few caches, nice wagon trails Rick told us. Keep that word in mind. Wagon trails. It'll come up later.

He then says something to the effect of "I'm surprised you'd want to hike with a bunch of hobbit sympathizers..." A challenge. We couldn't possibly turn down a challenge like that from a hobbit lover. And they knew that. Clue #1...

Fast forward to Saturday. It's cold. Very cold. It's misting rain. We envision a slippery trail. Do we turn back? Of course not. We're Zen Bassmasters, and Zen Bassmasters equals "not too bright".

We arrive at the land trust parking and notice that there are an awful lot of familiar faces there of the hobbit-y variety. And they all seem amused to see us. Clue #2. But our danger sense was frozen in the cold and we thought nothing of it. Fortunately, there were also some friendly faces, including Saintseester and her daughter, complete with Pink Walking Stick of Doom!! Saintseester is a regular reader of the blog and always has nice comments so we were thrilled to put a face to the name. The pink walking stick was impressive as well. You'd certainly never lose it in the woods and, if you got hurt, it's bright enough to signal passing aircraft. Also in attendance was Parrgolf who, despite keeping company with some shady hairfoots, is a pretty good guy. We also met some other find folks like Stephanie2427 who was soon to become my partner in slow. One face we didn't see was Rick's significantly better half and honorary Bassmaster RN2B. This should have also been a clue to us as RN2B probably didn't want to see her fellow Bassmasters lured into the evil hobbit trap.

After an informative, if COLD, discussion about the Landtrust and the history of the Bushwhacker Johnson trail, we set off. Very early on in the trail, we slipped and slid, always on precarious footing. Finally, gravity won its fight with me and I slipped in the mud. I spun in the opposite direction trying to keep myself up but then my other foot slipped and I did the splits. Now I'm sure most of you have never weighed 380 lbs but let me tell you that there's a reason you've never seen a 380 lb man do the splits before. The physics of it are not pretty. And the muscles in both my hamstring and my groin were not appreciative. The move did get me a 10 from all of the assembled "judges", except for Mad Mike, heretofore known as the East German Judge, who insisted it was at most a 7.5 because I didn't "stick" my landing on the back leg. The nerve of some people.

On down the trail a little further, Fish got his moment to "shine" as he slipped and landed square in the mud on his butt. Great. 2 of the three Bassmasters present are now injured, but do we turn around? Of course not. Press on.

Soon after, we noticed Saintseester, her daughter, and even the Pink Walking Stick of DOOM! were gone as well. Apparently she's smarter than we and had gotten out while the getting was good. Since we're not so smart ourselves, we kept moving.

We continued down and I began to lag behind, my hamstring giving me fits. Rick, who had been given charge of ensuring all the sheep made it out alive, hung back and Parrgolf, bless his soul, stayed back as well to make sure no hobbit loving shenanigans happened out of earshot of the group. I mentioned "wagon trails" to Rick, along with the fact that I would like to see the wagon that would make it down the mountain. He just smiled knowingly and waited for me to die.

Finally, we made it down to the spring where Bushwhacker Johnson surrendered. We felt pretty good, despite a couple of injuries. Maybe we'll make it out of this hobbit trap alive yet. It was then that a nice fellow reminded us that the mile and a half we just did was only a small part of the battle. Once again, Monte Sano had teamed up with our old enemy gravity to try and defeat us.

But that's a story for another day.

See you then.

-Gryph

There and Back Again: Alternate Perspective

2006-11-13T20:14:00.000-08:00

When we conquered Monte Sano, it was such a big deal that I asked all of the other Zen Bassmasters to write something up about their feelings on this momentous occasion. To date, only Tserof has taken up my challenge.

May God have mercy on our souls...

I refuse to be blamed for this...

"Joan drive well.
Tserof was hungry.
Joan parked van but hit big bump.
Tserof dreads hike down.
Tserof doesn't want to leave van.
Tserof tries to hide the fear.
Tserof thinks trail not so bad today.
OUCH. Tserof racks himself.
Tserof liked over under better.
Wet leaves slippery.
Pretty cave.
Others stupid to risk lives in cave.
They saw a pretty waterfall.
Me likes shiny water falls.
They come out, I decide to go in.
Both Mikes guide down.
Tserof always horny.
Tserof molest cave.
Tserof thinks he feels cave get more moist.
Tserof find water fall.
Fish used his big rod to help tserof out.
Tserof hate taking pics.
More hike.
Tserof make loud breaths.
Joan poked the cache.
Usually fish does the poking.
Yay! We found bling!
Hobbits suck.
Tserof has to climb back out.
Tserof almost give up.
Can see cars though.
Hungry.
Royal Buffett if tserof make it out.
Wish I had cheesy bread :-(
Damn tserof horny again.
Why tserof think about cheesy bread so often.
Ugggh!"

I'll be back tomorrow with our update from this week. Let's just call it "Monte Sano's Revenge" for now. Trust me, this one's a doozy...

There and Back Again- Part 2

2006-11-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

Yeah, yeah. I know. It's been a week since I put up part 1 of our adventure. But I had an excuse. Ash and I have switched internet providers, necessitating a couple of days with only dial-up before our DSL got turned back on. I love you guys and I appreciate that you enjoy the blog, but I don't love you enough to upload pictures to a blog at 33.6k. My love only goes so far.

Anyway, the important part is done, right? We found the cache and exorcised our demons, we got revenge on the evil hobbits, and we found the precious.

One problem... We had to go back up. See, up's a pain in the butt for us. It's that whole gravity thing which, as Mad Mike is fond of saying, is always keeping the fat man down. Down is no big deal. It hurts our knees but when you weigh 400 lbs, down is your natural state. Up on the other hand...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We still have the cache to deal with. As most of you who read this blog know, we have a bit of a "friendly" rivalry going with the hobbits and hobbit sympathizers. Well, friendly if you define friendly as "consistently trying to lead each other into situations that will get us killed." We're kind of like the Spy vs. Spy of the geocaching world. As a function of that, I've adopted a Gollum persona on the dixiecachers board, so before we moved on, I had to strike my best Gollum pose with my prize from the cache, which I decided was My Precious.

After we dawdled around a while, saying goodbye to the cave and psyching ourselves up for our trip up. Finally, we decided it wasn't going to get any easier with us sitting around so we pressed on.

The trip up was relatively uneventful. Mad Mike's knee was still giving him some problems from the fall in the cave but he made it up ok with help from Fish. Ashlynne and I stayed back to make sure Tserof survived the trek up. To Tserof's credit, he did at least learn from his previous mistakes and didn't rack himself on the over-under tree.

After some walking and some serious heavy-breathing, we made it to the top! The hobbits have officially not beaten us! We took a picture at the top to commemorate the occasion.

From there we broke for lunch and enjoyed some good Chinese food from the Royal Buffet. We were elated to have defeated Monte Sano and so took our time to enjoy the food. As we got ready to leave, I got the strangest fortune cookie I've ever gotten in my many, many trip to Chinese restaurants. I can quote it exactly because Ashlynne saved it and taped it to my computer desk. It said "Come back later... I am sleeping. (yes, cookies need their sleep too).

Can someone explain that one to me? I think there may be some zen in there somewhere and, being a ZEN bassmaster, I feel like I should know the answer. Someone once told me that the secret to fortune cookies was to add ...in bed to the end of it. I supposed "yes, cookies need their sleep too... in bed" makes sense, but it doesn't really change the meaning much. The possibilities keep me awake at night...

From there, we headed out to do a series of caches called "Schoolhouse Rock." This was one of Ashlynne's requests, having been a big fan of the Schoolhouse Rock programs when she was a kid and currently owning the Schoolhouse Rock box set and the Schoolhouse Rock Rocks! soundtrack.

Not much to say about all of these. They were all little magneto micros that gave us varying degrees of problems trying to find them. There was much singing of the songs as we all grew up with Schoolhouse Rock. I was a bit disappointed, since we were near the Huntsville government buildings, that there wasn't a cache dedicated to my favorite Schoolhouse Rock song "I'm just a bill."

In preparation for the caches the day before, Ash and I watched the entire box set and, I have to say, someone in the Schoolhouse Rock camp was the modern day Nostradamus. If you please, I present you the song for today, Energy Blues.

Energy...
Sometimes I think I'm runnin' out of energy
Seems like we use an awful lot for
Heatin' and lightin' and drivin'
Readin' and writin' and jivin'
Energy ... You'd think we'd be savin' it up.

Energy ... You can get it by dammin' up a river
Energy ... A windmill can make the breeze deliver
But even with millin' and dammin'
Our needs are so much more demanding
For energy ... We have to use some kind of fuel.

Chop, chop, chop, he cavemen used wood to start their fires.
Chop, chop, chop, they made all the tools that they required.
Chop, chop, chop, inventions got more and more inspired.
The fires got higher and higher,
And clearings got wider and wider.
Energy ... They were burnin' 'bout all their wood up.

Then one day men discovered that coal would do it better
Miners dug, and it looked like it might just last forever.
It seemed like the final solution.
It started the Industrial Revolution.
Energy ... We could just keep on diggin' it up.

Now in 1859 - way out in western Pennsylvania -
A man had built a rig that got some laughs from folks who came there
But suddenly, a mighty roar came up from under the ground.
And soon a gusher, gushin' oil, soaked all who stood around.
Now no-one knew, when that gusher blew,
The petroleum years were on us,
Or that so many cars and trucks would come to cause a crisis.

Energy ... We're looking to try and find some new kinds.
Energy ... Exploring to try and make a new find.
Nuclear and thermal and solar,
If we miss we'll get colder and colder.
Energy ... We've gotta stop usin' you up.

So don't be cross when momma says turn that extra light out.
Just turn it off till we find us a fuel that never runs out.
If everyone tries a bit harder,
Our fuel will go farther and farther.
Energy ... We're gonna be stretchin' you out.

Fast forward 25 years and I kind of wish I'd listened to that sad little Earth man singing as I put the $2.25 gas in my minivan...

From there, we went on to "Is this where they get the fresh fish" by our old "friend" and hobbit sympathizer Rick618. This is a cache that could present a lot of muggle problems at times but the place was empty when we came out and we found the cache pretty easily. Woohoo! Two victories over the hobbity types!

From there, we went to "Dead Children's Playground" which is apparently a well-known ghost tale in the Huntsville area. How well known we discovered soon enough. As we got there, we saw a problem. A family was there with a couple of kids playing right inside the playground, in the area where the GPSr was pointing.

We wandered around a bit as the parents asked if we were "ghost hunting." Kind of. Finally, we hit on a plan. We poke around outside the playground hoping to draw the family's attention and we send Ashlynne in with one of the GPSr to see if she can find the area we're looking for. No dice. The little kids see her and immediately leave their playing to follow her around, asking about the GPS, what she's doing, and then, to all of our amusement, to tell her about the legend of the Dead Children's Playground. We chuckled a bit as the father said he'd heard the story when he was a kid. We decided we weren't getting the cache without risking it being muggled and moved on.

Our final cache of the day was "The Bibbs", which is a cemetary cache. We like cemetary caches and are sad that some ancient law has now made them banned in Tennessee. How do you expect people to see history, to care about the people who came before, to give a damn about the folks who shaped the world they live in, unless you give them a reason to go out and make it fun. I don't have time to go research every cemetary in the world to seek out famous people. Geocaching has introduced me to people I never even knew lived but who made history in some way. Now that's lost to Tennessee due to some short-sighted law against "gaming" inside a cemetary and it makes me sad. We have the time in Tennessee to pass laws that make it legal to scoop up the possum you hit with your car and eat it, but we have to protect society from evil geocachers who want to learn a little history, honor the dead by celebrating their lives in cache descriptions, and have a little fun doing so...

Ok, off the soap box now. The Bibbs celebrates a former Alabama governor and his bride who died young (and, to be fair, none to bright. She ate poison instead of epsom salts). We walked around the cemetary for a bit and saw lots of governors and other luminaries. Good stuff.

Well, that's it. 50 lbs and 40 degrees of difference definitely made the difference today. But I don't think that's all of it. I think we've maybe grown up a little. The first time we did Monte Sano, we were almost comically unprepared. We only had the coords for parking, we didn't even know to solve the puzzle to get the coordinates. We didn't have water, and we were just generally unprepared. Some time has passed since then and, while the Bassmasters are certainly no well-oiled machine, we've at least applied a little WD-40 to the gears and are slowly moving along.

It's kind of like when you go back to your hometown for the class reunion. You go out to the creek you played in as a kid and are shocked at how small it is, and how big it seemed in your little kid's eyes. You walk through the hallways of your school and everything seems so little. You see pictures of yourself as a kid and laugh at how you could ever be so small, so naive, so full of yourself and ignorant of the world that you feel you can conquer everything, in spite of all the odds.

And, you know what? You usually could...

Until next time,

-Gryph

There and Back Again- Part 1

2006-10-29T17:44:00.000-08:00

Back in my younger and skinnier days, I used to help out on my family's farm. We owned horses and my job was to get on the least tame, most fiesty, most ornery horse and basically ride the hell out of them until they learned who was the boss and could be trained. Needless to say, I got thrown a lot and donated more than one pint of blood to the cause. But I learned one thing from that experience. Horses are stubborn; But not as stubborn as I am. Getting thrown just made me mad; made me get up, get back on, and ride harder. It usually got me thrown again, but it just made me madder. Eventually, the horse would decide it was easier to just let itself be ridden than to have to fight me constantly. And it was right. I HATE to lose.

So those of you who have been here a while can imagine what one cache, Fellowship of the Bling, has done to me. The Zen Bassmasters tried to tackle it the first time we ever went geocaching and, due to some pretty serious (not to mention comical) miscalculations in planning, it kicked our butts. If you don't already know the whole story, scroll to the bottom of the blog. It's the first post and it's a doozy.

Since that day, we vowed we'd come back someday. That we'd get back up on the horse and give it another try. We promised ourselves that when we'd lost some weight and the temperature got a little more friendly, we'd go back and this time we'd beat Monte Sano.

Today, we decided to try it. The temperature is nearly 40 degrees below where it was when we first tried it and the collective Bassmasters have lost around 100 lbs since then. It seemed like as good a time as any to give it a go.

Unfortunately, the Fates didn't think the deck was stacked against us quite enough and threw some added odds into the mix. First, we moved Tserof into his new apartment yesterday, necessitating about 20 trips up and down the stairs to his apartment, most of it balancing heavy furniture on our shoulders. So we were a bit sore. Second, we moved yet another friend into his new house this morning before the trip. This one didn't involve stairs and was really just a move next door so no problem, right? Right... Lifting a dresser to move out of their bedroom, my arms lifted and my back did not. Ow...

After the move, we made a quick trip home so I could take a painkiller and maybe commune with my hotpad for a few minutes, since we had almost an hour before we had to meet Fish at "Fluff Cache", which is near Yserof's new place. As I had just settled down with my hotpad, I hear the telltale sound of Fish's Jeep/monster truck. Sure enough, Fish had forgotten to reset his clock to standard time and had therefore not "Fallen Back" or even "Sprung Forward" for that matter but had joined the stubborn residents of Indiana who refuse to go anywhere at all. He came in and we shot the bull for a few minutes while he printed off the pages for the day's caches.

Finally, we were ready to go meet Tserof and Mad Mike. Just as we were getting ready to head out, I had a horrible sense of deja vu. "Did anyone ever solve the puzzle and get the coordinates for Bling", I asked. Fish and Ashlynne look at each other with that "I thought you did it" look. I sighed. This was not beginning well... Fish sat down and worked out the coordinates while I wondered what else we'd forget and if maybe just spending the day communing with my hotpad might not be such a bad idea.

We picked up Tserof and Mad Mike and we made our way down to Huntsville. You could cut the tension in the van with a knife. Well, except for from Fish, who hadn't been down the first time and didn't know the true evil of hobbits. Mike and I tried to talk about some of the music on my mp3 player, but it was halfhearted. We were all focused on the impending deaths we were all probably about to face. Gallows humour abounded as we made jokes about forgetting to get the phone number of the lady we met at an event who was part of the dog rescue team.

Finally, after a typically Zen Bassmaster Semi-Circular Course Correction, we were at the spot. Since Ashlynne had brought the camera, we decided to take a "before" picture of Tserof, since he was voted "Most Likely to Die on Monte Sano" and we wanted something nice for his funeral.

We pointed out to Fish some of the "landmarks" of our early journey, namely the creek we made Ash root around in thinking the cache was there (since Tserof had only loaded parking coords).

Finally, we'd messed around enough and made our way in. We narrated for Fish as we went. I felt like a victim who has gone to the scene of a tragedy to recover. There's the sapling that I used for balance. There's the stairstep rocks. There's the tree that we had to go over and under at the same time. The only thing that was changed was the tree, which had fallen a bit and now was a tree you had to go over and over again. Fish and Mad Mike made it fine, with warnings to us that the fallen leaves there made it slick. Tserof then went, slung his leg over the tree, and proceeded to rack himself as he set his foot down. Hilarity ensued. Tserof, who was now ready to apply to the church choir for high soprano, was not amused. He gingerly removed his injured part from the tree and stepped over, insisting that I wouldn't find it funny when it happened to me.

Having no intentions of causing any sort of damage to Ashlynne's property, I found a rock beside the limb that Tserof had overlooked, put my foot there, and climbed over without any damage to my guys. Again, Tserof was not amused.

Let me say again that, while fall may be a preferable time to cache due to the milder temperatures and lack of snakes, wet fallen leaves are slippery little bastiches and made our jobs tough. We slipped and slid all the way down, always making sure we had a firm grounding with our walking sticks before moving on.

Finally, we made it to the cave. Again, if you read the first blog entry we did, you know this cave (which probably has a name but which has evaded me now) is the thing that got us hooked on geocaching. It's a thing of beauty and even our 50 lbs heavier, 40 degrees hotter selves were happy we walked down just to see it. Better yet, we got to see that "first to find" sense of wonder again from Fish, who was setting eyes on it for the first time.

Last time we didn't have any equipment to explore the cave and so had to just look at it from the outside. This time, we brought flashlights and had every intentions of going inside to look around. We even brought water along, something we didn't do last time, and decided to take a picture to prove it to all the doubters.

We left Tserof up top with the cell phone in case we needed a good 911 signal. Fish and Mike went down first. Fish made it ok but Mike involuntarily ended up sliding down the first bit on his butt, leaving a nice skid of mud that I'm sure made us quite popular when we went to lunch after. I didn't even try to walk it down, deciding to take Mike's path by choice rather than by force. That gravity. It's always keeping the fat man down...

After the first bit, it was no problem and we were rewarded with an absolutely beautiful cave with a little waterfall in the back. In fact, since we're on pictures, here's a picture of my wife under the waterfall.

And here's a picture from the inside of what our trip back looked like.

We headed out, being quite careful of the slippery bits and all made it out fine except for Mad Mike who slipped and busted his knee pretty hard. Fortunately, he wasn't seriously hurt, although you could definitely tell he was feeling the pain.

Once we got up, Tserof's sense of curiousity overcame his sense and he decided to go down after all. Ashlynne and I stayed up on 911 duty while the took Tserof down. He was as amazed as we were. Actually, more so as some of the rocks in the cave apparently bore a passing resemblance to one of his favorite parts of Cali who is, sadly, no longer in Tserof's life and therefore no longer the favorite subject of our humour. Ok, that's not fair. She still is, but it's just not as fun now that Tserof's in on the joke. Anyway, I hear a piercing scream from Mad Mike and think his knee has given out again. No, it's worse. Tserof was apparently groping the cave wall and it was more than poor Mike's brain could handle. After quickly dunking Tserof in the cold waterfall of the cave to get his hormones under control, they started out. As you can see from the picture, it was an interesting tag team operation getting Tserof out of there.

We made it out and rested a bit before heading for the cache, celebrating our victory over the cave with a rousing rendition of the Zen Bassmasters theme song. Let's all sing along.

Fish heads
Fish heads
Roly Poly
Fish heads
Fish heads
Fish heads
Eat 'em up
Yum!

From there we headed down to the area where we thought the cache was. We found a big pile of rocks that didn't look to fun to climb down. We sent Fish and Ashlynne, the skinniest of us, down to hunt while Mike, Tserof, and I looked above. After a bit of poking, Ashlynne poked into a hole and heard a metallic sound... and then..

We found it!

Well, it's late and The Wire's on so I'm going to cut out. More to come later in the week.

Midnight Madness

2006-10-24T18:13:00.000-07:00

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.

The Gods Must Be Caching

2006-10-17T19:27:00.000-07:00

By Zeus!

I always wanted to say that... This week we're headed to the Murfreesboro/Smyrna area to do the Greek Gods series of puzzle caches. Ashlynne has had this series on her want list for a while so we decided to knock them out. Tserof is down with a cold this week and unable to attend, although as you see we managed to make him part of the team in any case. More on that later. The soundtrack for this week is Live on St. Patrick's Day by The Dropkick Murphys.

We headed into Murfreesboro and decided to hit one of Monkeybrad's caches on the way, called Too Cool. As is standard with us, we had to make a couple of semi-circular course corrections to get here. Nice little tourist spot that I somehow missed during the 3 years I was a student at MTSU. It's subtitled "An Evil Micro" but it was placed at about eye level for Fish, who found it easily. It might be evil for a short person. Cache hiding is a little different for us. We automatically look at eye level now because a) we've learned that people hide things there when they're trying to not be obvious and b) it doesn't require us to bend or stoop in any way. In fact, as Rick618 proved recently with Huntsville Arch, the easiest way to hide something from us is to hide it at our feet, since most of the Zen Bassmasters have DNF'd their feet for several years. Closed circuit to Brad (who sometimes reads the blog), drop us a mail and let us know where you got the cache container for this one. I found some on Ebay but didn't know if there was another place with better pricing. While we found it easily, I can see the potential for evil in the things and so it needs to become part of ZB's Super Leet Sekret New Cache, Smeagol's Revenge. Coming eventually to a wooded area near you.

Next up was the first part of the Greek Gods series, Aphrodite- Greek God of Beauty. As we started looking for the cache, Fish asked Ashlynne if she'd done the research for this one, a request he'd made to her by e-mail earlier in the week. Research?, she asked. It's gonna be a long day.

Turns out that Ashlynne was supposed to research the letters of the Greek alphabet, since we needed to know them to solve the puzzle. A quick survey of the group showed that none of us had much clue as to the letters of the Greek alphabet, none of us ever having belonged to a fraternity (as I pointed out at the time, I would never have a fraternity whose standards were lax enough to let me in. I can't be seen with people like that). We tried calling Fish's wife Chri for help but were sternly informed that she had just formed a raid group in Everquest 2 and had no time for us. That girl's serious about her gaming and I certainly wasn't going to be the one to try and stand between her and obtaining the ultra-rare drop Sword of No Life +4.

So we decided to go it alone, hoping that our limited knowledge of mythology and my knowledge of college greek culture (which mostly consists of the Lambda Lambda Lambda fraternity from Revenge of the Nerds) would help us along. We went out to where the cache was supposed to be and began to look around. After about 5 minutes of looking, I turned around and there it was... in plain sight... At about eye level. Honestly, if it had been in any more plain sight it might as well have been on the side of the road. That's the hazard of constantly trying to find caches hidden by evil hobbits, hobbit sympathizers, monkeys, and the Spanish Inquisition. You look so hard for the "evil" hides that a spot out in the open plum evaded us.

But we found it and, sure enough, encountered a symbol none of us knew. We pondered it for a moment, turned it sideways to see if it made more sense and, when it didn't, dutifully copied it down in hopes that once Chri got her Helmet of Wootness that she'd take pity on her poor unprepared clan and give an assist.

Next up was Hades- Greek God of the Dead. Not surprisingly, Hades was hanging out in a cemetary, or near a cemetary. I'm not sure it could get inside the cemetary as the poor people inside had been overtaken by what looked like several decades of overgrowth. We only knew it was a cemetary by the lone tallest marker there which was valiantly putting up a losing battle not to be overtaken by the vines. Kind of sad. Again we got the symbol from it, again unfamiliar to us, copied it down and moved on.

Next was Athena- Greek god of Wisdom. Not a lot of wisdom in our little group but, despite that, we found the cache pretty easily in a little park. This one actually had a symbol some of us recognized. And there was much rejoicing.

Next is Zeus- Greek god of the Sky. Not entirely sure why this was the Greek God of Sky since it was near a water treatment plant (pretty cool actually. By this time I had a tummy ache from too much lunch and just wanted to stop and look at the water but Fish wouldn't let me... Fecking slave driver he is...) Again, not a terribly hard find but once again we had no clue of the symbol. So far we had one number of the final coordinates. Fish tried Chri again but the raid was still on although she promised us that the ultra-super-mondo-rad rare was going to spawn any minute and she'd be ready to help out. Okay then... Pressing on.

Next was Ares- Greek God of War. This was in another park and it was here that we learned that the town of Smyrna is dead bloody serious about traffic safety. Every little intersection, no matter how small or unused, had a 4-way stop including requisite signage promising dire penalties for anyone not obeying said signage. When I say every intersection, I mean EVERY intersection. I'm pretty sure I saw a trail to an anthill that had a 4-way stop at it. The park was much more difficult than the cache, which was a pretty easy find. Another symbol none of us knew and, with only one figured out and one cache left to do, we began to worry that we wouldn't finish it.

As we drove to the next cache, Poseidon- Greek God of the Sea, which was near a marina, we passed a road where the GPS seemed to think we should go. "Nah", Fish tells us. "That's a private business drive.", pointing at the sign for a restaurant nearby. "We need to go down the next one. Trusting the guy with the GPSr (and above Mad Mike's, the other guy with the GPSr, objection) we went where Fish led. We parked in the nice big parking lot and prepared for the .15 mile walk to the cache. We went down an embankment, through a copse of trees, along a little path, and out to... the other parking lot for the marina. The other parking lot for the marina being the place where the other road led. Sure enough, we followed the GPSr which led us through the huge parking lot and to a little wooded area maybe 100 yards from the edge of that parking lot. So there's your Zen Bassmaster moment for the week as we, once again, turned a park and grab into a .25 mile hike. My upset stomach cursed Fish and Mad Mike's hurt ankle was singing along. Found the cache pretty easily and once again took down the indecipherable symbol, the last of the day.

As we went back to the car, we tried to decide what to do about our Greek alphabet soup. Fish was going to call Chri again, risking the wrath only seeable by someone who has been interrupted from killing an elite mob she's been waiting 27 hours to spawn by a bunch of retarded geocachers who can't read. Then I hit on the bright idea of calling Tserof, who was out sick but still home (we assumed. You never know with Tserof). Sure enough, Tserof was home and quickly found the information we needed. I have to say at this point that I was a little nervous about where this was going. On the one hand, we have Fish, who was working on solving the puzzle and looking far too much like a monkey doing a math problem. On the other hand, I know he had information on the Greek alphabet from Tserof, who has trouble reading the English alphabet (having given up reading early in his life when he discovered he could be perfectly happy only knowing B-E-E-and-R.)

Fish puts in the coordinates that he swears are right and we're on our way. On the way to the final location, we pass near where Hades was and are alarmed to see smoke rising from the general area. We all look at Fish, our group's only smoker. He swears he wasn't smoking at the time and denies any responsibility for the fire. We head on to the final spot, hoping not to have gotten made and arrested for Fish's alleged arson. We drive around looking for the location, which seems to point into a field. We all look accusingly at Fish, who swears his coordinates are right. He rechecks them and confirms they're right so we drive around some more looking for a way to get there. Finally we turn into a residential neighborhood and the GPS leads to a person's house. Hoping this house is owned by the cache owner and not some militia nut just waiting for someone to come along so he can try out his AK-47, we go looking. We find the cache easily enough and we don't get shot (which is always good).

This is a pretty good series if you happen to be in the area. Not too hard but it takes you to a lot of places and gives a little challenge with the puzzle. Just research better than we did.

As we're headed out, I complain about not having anything funny for the blog this week. Fish mentions that there's a difficulty 4 near here and we decide to try it for blog fodder. The cache is called "Stickery Situation" and it was certainly stickery. Good thing too as that's the only part that lived up to what was promised. I'm not sure why the person hiding this cache thought it was a difficulty 4 but they are obviously not familiar with some of the difficulty 4 caches we've tried. Either that or too many evil hobbits have skewed our idea of difficulty. But I don't think so. Even though it says "don't expect to find this one easily" in the description, Mad Mike managed to spot it while about 50 feet from the spot. "Surely it's a decoy" we thought. But it wasn't. It was actually the cache. Not sure what they were thinking there...

Well that's all for this week folks. Probably not as funny as some of you would prefer but that's how the week went. We're back in Huntsville next week as well as scouting a location for a new TB Hotel we plan to put out. If that's not enough to fulfill your blood lust, all I can say is pray for dry weather because we've already got on the docket for sometime in November....

Well, I won't give it all away other than to say we're going back where it all began to exorcise some demons. Bring it hobbits. This time we're ready for you...

Until then...

-Gryph

Abbreviated Caching

2006-10-11T17:51:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back again this week after leaving you in the more than capable hands of Doc last weekend. Hopefully after getting a taste of what a real writer can do, you won't be too bored with me again. Unfortunately, this week is probably not going to be my finest return to the saddle as we had an abbreviated run this week.

Fish was out but was kind enough to plan a run for us before his vacation. He can't be blamed for our sloth-like progression this week. He had a full run of caches planned for us but two of the group (Mad Mike and Ashlynne) were nursing sore ankles and I was nursing an upset belly so we knocked off after 7 caches to go watch "The Departed". More on that later...

To begin the day, we met up at Tserof's house and Ashlynne mentioned that, since Fish was out, our group was down to 4, a perfect size for Tserof to pick up the driving duties this week. So we loaded into the Titan to pick up Mad Mike. Now I know Doc spent quite a bit of time last week talking up Jason's Titan, making the obligatory references to the namesake beings from mythology. While I wouldn't want to contradict my elder or my better (Doc is both), I have a different take. The Titan certainly looks like its mythological namesake from the outside, huge and impressive. Unfortunately, when Tserof drives the Titan, it less resembles a mythological being than it does the NFL team it is also named for. Just like the Titans, it can't hit the holes, it often drifts across the line illegally, and it has a bad habit of stomping on the heads of unsuspecting curbs.

Our first indicator of problems was when we reached Mad Mike's house. Making a quick eyeball of Mike's driveway, with a comparable look at the size of the Titan, divided by Tserof's notorious parking ability.... Well, I'm not much good at math but it wasn't really adding up. To his credit, Tserof did ok and managed not to take out the reflectors on either side of the driveway, but it was close. We picked up Mike and were on our way. The soundtrack for this week is Tserof's Ipod, which had an impressive collection of female singers on it, most notably Lucinda Williams and Iris Dement.

Headed in to Huntsville, we watched as the Tennessee Titan drifted ever closer to being "offsides". Finally, Tserof drifted too far and the poor frightened VW in the next lane over almost gave himself a heart attack trying not to become one of the cars at the monster truck rally. Tserof's comment? "That guy sure is driving strange..." Honestly...

We moved on to our first cache "Where are the caches in your neighborhood." As is tradition, our journey began with a semi-circular course correction as Tserof was too into the song he was listening to and missed the "it's right here. Tserof, it's here. Here. Here.... Back there." He got us turned around (and let me tell you, watching that thing turn on a residential street is a scary, scary thing) and despite knowing the pull-off was right there, managed to miss it again. Two semi-circular course corrections and we haven't even gotten our first cache yet. Typical.

Finally, Tserof muscles Eddie George around and we get to the spot. Very easy cache to find, kind of anti-climactic after Tserof turned pulling off the road into a difficulty 5 task.

Next was "Looking down on the Joneses." This was on the Governor's drive overlook which, fortunately, wasn't busy since Tserof needed 3 parking spaces to get Bruce Matthews in. We did have to do a little bit of trekking through the wood for this one, much to the chagrin of our hurt ankle folks. The cache itself was an easy enough find. The only real barrier here was that the GPS decided to take another of its Satanic moments and try to point us over the fence and into the residential area. Of course, we'd given Ashlynne, she of the Monte Sano navigation disaster, the GPS because, as Mike pointed out for me "it makes for good blogging." Finally, we got the GPS to behave and found the cache. There was another cache in this area but there were muggles about so we didn't grab it.

Next up was One for the Little Guys, which we skipped a few weeks ago on one of our kiddie caching trips because there was a bit more of a walk than we wanted to take the kids on. This time, we had two gimpy ankles and a rumbly belly so it wasn't much better, but we parked in the movie theater lot and walked over. Easy enough find, not a fun walk when you're hurting. By the time we got back to the car, we had all had very close to enough. With the movie theater nearby, we headed over to find out the play time for The Departed. Discovering we still had some time to kill, we headed out to do a few more caches.

Next up was A Palm fer Us, by Exotic Dancer, a fictional creation of our old nemesis Frodo, the bastard. If the other one was a bad walk for the hurt folks, this one was worse. Mike was cursing Frodo to almost Monte Sano levels by the end. Good cache though. Clever hide. Picked up a TB with a Superman attached. His mission is to go to Antarctica. I don't think I'm going to be getting him to there. If we can't tackle Green Mountain, I'm pretty sure Antarctica is right out. Besides, we've had a hell of a time trying to train Fish's two dogs to the sled.

Next up was 4 mile post rocks. This was far too close to Green Mountain for me and I started to have flashbacks, rock back and forth, and curse Rick618. Fortunately, this distracted me from watching Tserof attempt to navigate Bum Phillips through that road. I'm told it was pretty scary. Easy enough find and a nice little cave across the road. I didn't explore the cave as it was on the same side of the road as the trail and the memories overwhelmed me.

Next, we headed back to Governor's Overlook to pick up the cache that we missed because of the muggles before. This time Tserof didn't even try to park, just moving over to the side of the road (which still leaves his giant Frank Wycheck ass in the middle of the road but that's not the point). It took us a while to find this one as it was a bit tricksier than it seemed, but Ashlynne thought "outside the box" and found it finally.

Our last cache was Froggy Went a Courtin' by our very favorite cacher in the world and one of only two honorary Bassmasters, RN2B. We had to do this one. RN2B has never let us down, always hiding caches where the mentally retarded (read: us) can find it. It's nice of her to make geocaching accesible for the handicapped. Cool spot, cool container, but not too terribly hard, just what we expect and what makes her our favorite cacher. Let's all have a moment of silence in her honor.

....

...

...

...

Hey, these moments of silence fill blog space nicely... I should do those more often.

At that point, we were tired of caching but still had some time to kill so we took Tserof to his very favorite place in the world, Barnes and Noble. Tserof in a bookstore is like a penguin in the Mojave. It's pretty funny to watch. Mike and I, being heartless bastiches, steered Tserof (who, having seen Curious George that week wanted to go try his hand at them) to the required school reading instead. Tserof guided us through the section, showing us which books he'd watched the movies of, which he'd had to get the Cliff Notes on, and which he'd had to pay a friend to read for him. Mike was being kind, trying to convince Tserof to read good books like Frankenstein and Alice in Wonderland. I, on the other hand, was playing "bad cop" and trying to talk him into War and Peace or Silas Marner, a book so bad that even I, who minored in English in college, never made it through the thing. Tserof wanted to stick with the Curious George books. Finally, it was time for the movie.

I'm going to move away from geocaching discussion here to encourage you as strongly as I can to go see Martin Scorcese's "The Departed." Easily the best movie of the year so far. By far. I can't say enough good things about this movie. Great performances from everyone, including Leonardo DiCaprio, who I normally hate. Go see the movie. Right now, I'll wait.

Good stuff, eh? You can thank me later. I take cash, check, and paypal. I can even take your credit cards and will even return them to you in 6-8 months when I've finished with them.

Well, that's all for this week. Again, a short trip but we should be back on task next week as Fish is back and he usually keeps us focused.

Until then...

Designated Blogger

2006-10-01T19:45:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Ashlynne and I spent the weekend in Nashville and weren't able to go caching with the guys, but I knew you folks would be unhappy if there was no blog for this week, so I talked our friend Doc, who was tagging along in our absence, to write up the week's adventures. Doc could out-write me in his sleep, so you guys are in for a treat. Just don't get to liking it too much. You're back stuck with me next week...

Gryphon kindly asked me to write for the Zen Bassmaster's Adventures in Geocaching blog as he and Ashlynne were attending a concert that day. Some of you know me, but to those that do not I am Doc, or Entropy or Entropius. Like all of you, I've been fascinated by the tales of my friends' adventures, and joined them when I can. This day, Tserof, Fish and Chri asked if I would come along as some of the others would be absent, and a happy circumstance of scheduling made it so. I hope you can forgive me the discontinuity of styles between Gryphon and myself--I'm unfamiliar with the language of 'caching, but will do my best to describe a wonderful day.
We began that day with a pick-up truck. Not just any pick-up truck, but a truck of such reserves of strength and fortitude that it could shoulder the great burden of the Zen Bassmasters themselves. Such an awesome vehicle deserved an awesome name, and this is had. The Titan.
The Titan's amenities were many, it's drawbacks few but fierce. The great transport had an extended cab capable of blissfully free-knee movement for four, half it's systems were heated (and perhaps the rest, too), and cargo had no hope of escaping it's gated bed. It's brakes were mighty (as we discovered many times that day), it's acceleration sedate and untroubled by hill or valley, it's lights plentiful, and the mysteries of it's various storage compartments and cubbyholes a never ending source of wonder.
However, the Titan suffered from two key weaknesses. First, and perhaps most obvious, was it's voracious liquid thirst. A vampire of ancient fern, the magnitude of it's hunger wasn't clear until Tserof, shortly before our journey, drew a deep breath while removing the gas cap to insert the nozzle.
“You know, this thing holds twenty-eight gallons,” he told me ruefully.
A mighty thirst, indeed.
Secondly, the Titan's designers seemed to have had misconceptions about the girth of those that would ride it's steel frame. Having had such good engineering in all other aspects of the vehicle's seating, one wonders why those engineers failed to figure on folks greater than ten years of age when designing the safety features. So, aside from Fish, who religiously insisted on wearing his seatbelt irregardless of the discomfort and permanent disfigurement it caused, we relied on the numerous handles and sturdy protrusions to steady ourselves during the Titan's voyage.
Fish and Chri met Tserof and me at Tserof's place. Seat assignments were made and we began our pleasant trip to Huntsville, AL., where the day's festivities would play out. Heaven has made few things more perfect than a cool, sunny day in fall. The light breeze refreshed us and stirred the city vapors, and all in all the day itself became a reason to be out within it.
After a ritual male comparison of GPS devices, Tserof and Fish began negotiating which caches we would see in what order. It seemed Fish's goals that day were twofold--first, he wanted to gather as many “bugs” as possible before his trip next week to friends in Missouri. These bugs are an interesting aspect of 'caching, and a tribute to the good faith of the community itself. I've seen a few, and been impressed by the progress of them all. They are miniature Olympic torches, handed off one to another in an unbroken chain of good will, and for a few of them Fish was going to take a small part in their journey by giving them a two state jump. The stories they could tell if only they could talk.
Secondly, Fish was rapidly approaching his 100th cache. He had, in fact, meticulously planned out WHICH cache he wanted to be number 100. But most of the caches on the list that day were caches he'd already found that he'd since discovered had bugs--his idea was to allow the rest of to find these on our own while he chuckled and cajoled from a safe distance. THAT part of his plan, however, fell short--for the day was to be the day of Chri.
The first cache, No Birds Allowed, was in the outskirts of northeast Huntsville. After traveling through a lonely industrial part of town with endless steel buildings and warehouses, we broke into a fairly new residential subdivision with typically winding streets and cul-de-sacs. A couple of twists and “semi-circular course corrections” later, Chri spotted a significant street sign and we found a likely place to approach. After discovering several things a bird would find distressing, Chri located the cache itself. The engineering and application of the thing was ingenious--Fish took time to point out the features that made it both a good hide and aptly named.
It was about this time that we realized we weren't harnessing the full potential of the Titan. As we approached some railroad tracks on our way out, Fish urged Tserof, “Gun it! Gun it! You know you want to get some air-time.” Indeed! The Titan's flight characteristics were untried and unknown, yet it would be such a time saver to hop hills and rivers and dense foliage in the Titan on the way to inaccessible caches! Tserof wisely declined, however, instead limiting the Titan to jumping curbs, small rocks and potholes.
We ate at Beauregard's after some Magic Eight Ball Navigation (Tserof: “Do I go right?” Fish: “Yeah. Sort of.”) The infamous home of glow-in-the-dark all-you-can-eat chicken wings, the selection included more varieties of tongue-burning sauces and dips than there are words in the world meaning “Too Hot.” Fortunately, the drinks served were generous--I had four tall Diet Pepsis before it was all over. Fish discovered he liked the Jamaican Jerk sauce, while I was able to (after years of fortifying myself on mild salsa) eat the “hot” chicken wings. “Hot” being just two on scale of Mild to “Nuclear,” but we all must take pride in our baby steps.
During lunch, Fish made several predictions--naming a cache and pointing to each of us in turn and saying “You'll be the one to find this one, the rest of you will NEVER get it.” These predictions were at least partially correct--whenever he predicted Chri would find one, he was right.
After lunch, Fish was looking forward to showing us Grizzly Gator, but some muggles were nearby so we waved off. Instead, we had encounters with two great beasts. One, a fearsome life-sized bear carved in wood, stood menacingly before a home along the street near the cache. I wondered if it was a result of chainsaw art, given the many planes and angles there were. Secondly was a small grey squirrel. One might think that in a contest between a squirrel crossing the road and the Titan, the outcome would be certain. Not so--the squirrel was victorious as the Titan's quite ample brakes yielded the field! Squirrels 1, Titan 0.
We traveled on to the shade side of Huntsville's progress and industry, beneath the opening ribbons of Interstate that climb up on compressed concrete and rebar over the railroad tracks downtown. Here lay Dragon's Breath 2, and it was quite a find. This was left by a man named Zaybex, who I firmly believe is a rigger or longshoreman by day. It was a very clever hide, and once again Chri, who would not bow to the obvious, scored the find. While retrieval was going on, a freight train rumbled pass--it's been a long time since I'd seen one, and that sight alone would have made the day worth it.
We approached our next, Rocky's First Cache, through downtown Huntsville. Being a Saturday, it was quiet and deserted, but I still imagined the great Titan encountering those one way streets on it's own terms and being unbowed. No onslaught of oncoming traffic could deter our Titan! Let the pedestrians yield!
The cache itself was one both Tserof and Fish had seen before, so for the first time I was handed a GPS and told, “Go forth.” I did so, peering intently at the glowing compass heading and following it faithfully--to a point almost thirty feet away from the actual cache, which Chri found in moments.
By this time, Fish was getting nervous. Chri was scoring all the finds, and doing so with apparent skill and ease. Jokes about his predictions ceased, the Bart Simpson laughter was growing less pronounced. But I know he was quietly proud of her, for never was there any complaint.
We traveled along University Drive to the landmark Huntsville Arch. A pedestrian walkway meant to keep students safe from the Atlanta-like traffic speeding along the thoroughfare below, it spanned the distance between a school and a sub sandwich shop, two places well visited by school kids. Walking the arch itself is an experience! The spectacle of all that oncoming traffic rushing at you but suddenly passing harmlessly below is invigorating. This was another that Fish had been to, and he quite enjoyed watching us climb in and around the arch searching for the thing. When Chri finally found it, Fish admitted that while we were looking he tried to spot it and it took him three tries even knowing where it was!
A few twist and turns later led us to Girls Went a Courting, a cache that both Tserof and Fish had already found. Chri and I manned the GPSs again and rummaged around until Chri called out in triumph. A well decorated and populated box was the prize, as well as another notch for Chri's belt.
We traveled to a nearby cemetery for the next cache. Remember Dred Scott was one those caches that leads to a fascinating place. The cache itself, which Tserof found, was not obvious yet in an obvious place that was both respectful and complimentary to the setting. I'd never known the place existed, and was gratified to be led there--another great feature of geocaching.
We next traveled to the campus of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, my old alma matter. It's been years since I've been on the campus proper, and how it's changed! New buildings are everywhere, but the old buildings remain--I might still be able to find the cafeteria, after all. We parked the Titan and trekked off, encountering a fellow walking a large canine along the way with a leash that could more accurately be called a tow cable as the man was certainly being towed by the dog. Soon we were upon a shady place that I must have driven by a hundred times and never thought twice about it. Within were nestled some rocks overgrown with foliage. “Rocks!” Chri said, “I like rocks!” And, indeed, her instincts were again correct, except this time there was a conspiracy of dwadaling. The others made a point of resting and taking in the view while I was handed a GPS and wandered off. Eventually I found the thing--the largest cache of the trip and rather patriotically appointed to be noticeable, and still I walked by it twice. The gang logged us in and off we went.
We'd been at it for some hours and it was time for a pit stop. We chose an old Circle-C near the Space and Rocket Center, a place where an old friend used to work. Call him Kenchlo, none of us had seen him in years, and returning to that spot made us wonder. The store itself hadn't changed much--it lacked the Slushy machine that used to be our excuse to travel down at 4:30 AM to visit Kench at work, but otherwise still had the same diagonal rows of candy and starch and beer. If only our old friend Kench had been behind the counter to kid us about our strictly non-alcoholic refreshments, the scene would have been complete.
The next cache was something special. Fish proclaimed that Thorton Research Park was his favorite hide, and said he was going to particularly enjoy sitting and watching us grow frustrated. To his alarm, however, Tserof and Chri teamed up and reasoned it out, and finally found the thing in rather less time that Fish had before. Indeed, it was awfully clever, the work of a craftsman that impressed us all. But poor Fish, bemused yet proud of his wife, couldn't help but calling Chri and Tserof choice five letter words on our walk back to the Titan.
A feat or two of navigation later, and travel over what was perhaps the bumpiest paved road in the Huntsville area, we arrived at Off the Beaten Path. It was located in a place with a fantastic name--I even loved the name of the road in front of it. Yet, as the cache describes, it was rather desolate, a failed experiment in speculative real estate. The cache was hidden well enough, found by Tserof after a few minutes of searching. As Chri said, speaking of the types of flora nearby, “They could have been much more cruel.”
The sun was beginning to get sleepy and was headed towards it's nightly rest as we pulled into a public ball park. Saturday evening games had already started up, and we parked among a crowd of family minivans and harried mothers and fathers shuffling their little leaguers off to their glory. We marched to the beat of the GPSs and the roar of crowds and balls on bats, and soon entered a wood near the fields. We found what we believed was the setup indicated by the cache's name, but never could find the cache itself. Had it not been for the fading light, I'm sure we would have spent hours more looking.
Interestingly, we'd discovered a fairway completely covered in kudzu not far from the cache site. We gave it little attention until, at some point during our exploration, we heard a loud approaching rumbling and thunder. Alarmed, we looked around and, to everyone's surprise, saw a freight train rush past right through that field of kudzu! The kudzu, being so voracious, had grown right over the railroad tracks, concealing them until the train roared past.
It was now deep twilight, and we were making plans to return home. Fish still had a couple of things he wanted to try, so try we did. On the way to the first was the Mountain of Despair, the hill along Four Mile Post that Fish and Tserof and the others had all had near-death experiences upon. It sounded dreadful, and I could tell that even just driving by it was far too close for their comfort.
Four Mile Post Rocks, View of the Cave! was a nighttime find for us. The half moon hovered in the low horizon, obscured by mist and high broken clouds. It and the small flashlights we scavenged provided enough light for Fish and Tserof to find the cache. They described an unusual container, perhaps a candy dispenser of some sort, and Tserof said he'd like to get one to hide himself someday.
Fish said we'd get a kick out of Path to Nowhere, and right he was. Chri, still on her roll, found it almost within seconds, even in the dark. It's an interesting place that deserves something more--benches for quiet reflection, perhaps. Even the Path to Nowhere leads somewhere.
Finally came Fish's chosen cache, the cache he wanted to be his one hundredth. He knew about it because he'd encountered the place once before and decided it was great spot to hide a cache, yet when he researched it he discovered someone had beaten him to it. So he decided to find THEIR cache instead, which the rest of us wondered how it would be accomplished at night with two small penlights, one with fading batteries.
As we parked, Fish told us, “You can't find it, this one's mine!”
Tserof said, “You want us to wait here?”
“Oh, okay,” Fish replied, almost grudgingly, “you can come.”
And so we did--into a place that reminded me of a football stadium. After a bit of searching, Fish did indeed find the cache, and not once did the flashlights see service.
Our adventure in geocaching was complete. We'd spent a full eight hours traveling around and having a good time--I'm deeply thankful for the chance to spend time with Tserof, Fish and Chri, and glad to have experienced again this remarkable hobby of theirs. Every cache we found had the weight of history, the lingering touch of other human hands, their works and skill made substantial before our very eyes. It's a type of history you can see and feel and know where it's been and follow where it's going. Real people came before, and real people will come after, and they will see the names and wonder who those people were...
...but they will KNOW why they were there.

Rainy Day Caches #12 & 35

2006-09-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

Woohoo! The band is back together. Tserof's back with us this week so it's our usual crew of me, Fish, Tserof, Ashlynne, and Mad Mike. Unfortunately, the clouds overhead portend a wet day of geocaching ahead. Not to worry, Mike tells us. He's looked at the weather and the storm's going to blow through in an hour or so.

Give or take a couple of days...

This week, we're moving some of our bugs from Alabama last week North via the "TB Underground Railroad" to Smyrna. We've got several new caches to try and one, Notorious, that we had to DNF previously and are giving another go. Our soundtrack for the week is Tristania "Ashes".

On the drive up, we notice Tserof nodding off. We were pretty sure we knew the cause, but didn't ask, not wanting to risk an appearance by Tserof's alter ego "Too Much Information Man." Unfortunately, as you will see soon enough, we found out anyway. And none of us will ever be the same.

After a nice big lunch at Chef Wang's in Murfreesboro, we headed on to Smyrna. Tserof, now full and sleepy, nodded right over and was out for the entire drive. As we approached our first cache, To the Boat Ramp, Ashlynne reached over to shake Tserof awake. At that point he, to our horror, started mumbling "not now Cali. not now Cali."

At this point I should probably explain why this horrified us so much. Cali is Tserof's... Well, I don't know if girlfriend is the right word. Gal pal seems a bit flippant. Having discussed it over with the group, I think we've decided "Ghetto Princess" may be the appropriate term. Suffice it to say that, when we say Tserof is "Too Much Information Man", she's the person he's sharing too much information about. So, needless to say, his mumbling "not now Cali..." had a predictable effect. Ashlynne recoiled in horror, then began beating on Tserof harder, hoping to wake him up and stop the pain. Mad Mike, who was unfortunate enough to be sitting beside Tserof as he began this, didn't even wait for the van to come completely to a stop before leaping out and running from the van in panic (well, we don't run but he waddled at a much faster pace than normal), presumably willing to risk injury leaping from the van over the chance Tserof might move on to a different part of his dream and, instead of saying "not now Cali" (a phrase, as Mike pointed out, Tserof has never actually said in real life) and move on to "go for the whip!" or "bring out the hamster" or something equally awful.

Finally, Ashlynne pounds hard enough on Tserof's head to wake him, where he promptly denies saying any of it. Fish and I are nearly doubled over with laughter, Mad Mike is rocking and mumbling like Rain Man, and Ashlynne has gone on hitting Tserof in the head well longer than was technically necessary.

The cache was a pretty easy one to find. Tserof was still shaking off the effects of sleep and the rest of us were shaking off the bad mental images but Mike (who had a pretty good lead on us due to his panicked flight from the van) found the cache. Fish took the 50 state coin since he's planning to take a trip through three states in a couple of weeks.

We loaded back into the van and took shifts keeping Tserof (heretofore known as "Dormouse") awake to avoid another "Ghetto Princess Dreamland Interlude." By now, it was starting to rain pretty good. We were pretty sure the time had passed when the storm was supposed to "move on through" according to the weather Mike read, but it seemed to have no intention of moving anywhere.

Did we go home? Did we hole up somewhere and wait it out? You don't know us very well, do you?

Pressing on, we went to do John Wesley's Cache. We went to the area the GPS pointed, and it was an alleyway. Since the description promised a church, we were a bit puzzled. Mike got his GPS zeroed in and noticed that it pointed several hundred yards away from where Fish's was pointing. Since looking for Fish's location wasn't producing anything that looked capable of supporting a cache, we went to follow Mike. As we walked, Fish fiddled with the other GPS and noticed he had missed clicking on the cache and had somehow, instead, clicked on the geographic center of Smyrna. Oops....

Fish got the other GPSr fixed and, sure enough, it pointed to the same place where Mike's did. Now, remember a couple of things here. First, that this is several hundred yards from where we parked, second, that it's raining pretty hard by now, and third, that there's a parking lot like 3 feet from the cache. Honestly, a person with long arms could almost reach out of the car and grab it. So, in true Zen Bassmaster fashion, we walked a few hundred yards, in the rain, to get a park and grab... Figures.

The rain was starting to slack up as we moved on, this time to try and get Notorious. We headed for the Percy Priest trail and, as we got onto the trail, the bottom dropped out. We were soaked to the bone. Worse, yet, it was bloody dark under all those trees and we had two keychain flashlights to compensate. We made a good attempt to find the cache but the darkness, the rain, and the fact that all of us who wear glasses (read: all of us) could barely see, we had to once again DNF the cache.

We headed for one of the pavilions to wait out the worst of the storm and try to dry off. All you folks who always want to go with us on these things, be glad you weren't with us today as all the guys took off our shirts to wring them out. Man titties abounded and pasty white flesh was on display. Not a pretty thing. Ashlynne had already gone into the bathroom to wring her shirt out (pity, since her boobs are the only ones worth seeing in the lot) but got back in time to see the Zen Bassmaster Fatboy Burlesque Show. She didn't seem amused...

Once the rain subsided a bit, we headed for our next cache, Tennis Anyone? This is an old tennis court that has gotten grown over. Kind of a cool location, although pretty darn slippery in the rain. Cache was an extremely easy find. Inside was a travel bug with a guitar attached. Its mission is to visit music related venues. And I just happen to be going to an Alice Cooper concert at the Ryman next weekend so I figured I could get a picture there and maybe even bring the thing in with me if I can attach it to my keys well enough to make it look like a keychain.

Our next cache was Crown Castle TB Hotel. We definitely wanted to do this one as Fish was looking for a few bugs to collect and take to Kansas City with him on his trip. Additionally, several of us had bugs to drop somewhere and a TB Hotel seemed like a good place to do it. Easy find, and found several bugs inside. I took one called the "viral cache" which has you attach a sticker to a trade item to make a "virtual viral bug" with it. Pretty cool.

Next up is Rock Springs Hideaway. This is in the owner's back yard. Blake&Nettie placed the cache and own the house in front of it. Nice place and an easy enough find. We signed the log and waved toward the house. By now, it's getting pretty dark so we head to do one last cache that Fish has been trying to get for a while, the aptly titled "Muggles are all around." Sure enough, he's been foiled by muggles every time he's tried to get it. This time, the muggles weren't so prevalent and we found the cache. Not sure of the wisdom of the placement since it's someplace where it can come into pretty direct contact with water and, by the look of the log book, the container isn't nearly as waterproof as they apparently thought it was.

All in all, a decent day. Aside from the whole bad mental image thing with Tserof's "Ghetto Princess" dreams and the extremely wet day, we did alright. Didn't get as many caches as we'd have liked due to the weather.

Next week, Mad Mike will be out of town with his brother and Ash and I will be in Nashville going to the Alice Cooper concert so Fish, Tserof, Chri, and our friend Doc will cache without us. Their plan is to hit Huntsville and re-do some of the more creative caches we've seen recently that everyone but Fish had to miss. Doc has offered to write up next week's blog entry and you guys are in for a treat. Doc writes better in his sleep than I could ever think of at any time. Come back next week and I promise you won't be disappointed. You may be disappointed in my blog entries from there on out, but next week should be good.

Ash and I do plan on meeting up with Fish and Tserof Sunday to go to the "Finger Lickin' Chicken" event in Nashville, hosted by the legendary JoGPS. Stay tuned for that as well.

Until next week...

-Gryph

Caching my Way Back Home- Part 2

2006-09-23T21:25:00.000-07:00

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

Caching My Way Back Home- Part 1

2006-09-19T18:18:00.000-07:00

No reason for that title this week, other than Rush's "Finding My Way" has been running through my skull for some reason, so there you have both the title and the soundtrack for this week.

This week, we're caching around Huntsville, culminating in the Adios Dog Days event. Tserof is out this week so it's just me, Fish, Mad Mike, and Ashlynne. No children. No newbies. Just the core.

Our first cache this week is Dragon's Breath. We parked under the bridge, noted the homeless population off to the side, and also noted that the coordinates seemed suspiciously close to the railroad tracks. It was listed as a pretty high difficulty so we figured something fishy must be up. We looked around a culvert nearby, and had no luck. We were still a bit suspicious of the proximity to the railroad tracks, so we rebooted the GPSr and it continued to point the same place. Took us another half hour or so to find it but it was worth the effort. I won't say anymore than that to keep from spoiling the cache other than to say it involved a rubber chicken and any cache that involves a rubber chicken is ok with me.

Our second cache is Huntsville Arch, by our old friend and noted hobbit sympathizer Rick618. This one's on the walkway that goes over University Drive to UAH. I've never been here before and it was pretty neat standing on top and watching the traffic zoom underneath. This is another tough difficulty cache and it earned every point of it. Only one who associates with the ultimate evil, hobbits, could ever devise such a mean and evil cache. We looked high and low, climbed up and down the walkway. Ashlynne even looked under the walkway. Finally, I read the clue again, remembered that Rick would probably want his cache to be accessible to the short, hairy-footed set, and looked downward. That did it and we found thecache. Very cool hide.

Next up is another of Rick's caches, Remember Dred Scott. This one's in an old slave cemetary that I didn't even know existed in Huntsville. I always like it when we learn something new with a cache. Good hide on this one too. It nearly eluded us.

Next up was the one I was most looking forward to as I'd heard a lot of good things about it. Thornton Research Park. As usual, we ended up having to turn around, although Fish insisted on calling it a "semi-circular course correction", a theme which would continue throughout a day filled with them.

Thornton Research Park didn't disappoint. Again, I can't really say much here other than to say that it combined my two least favorite types of caches, micros and guardrail caches, but did something so unique with them that it was much more than the usual cliche. Great cache. Took us a while to find this one but it was well worth it. We've definitely got to bring Tserof and the others back to do this one, as it's not one to be missed. If you haven't done it, go do it. Right now, I'll wait.... Done it? Good. Moving on.

Next up was Trading Pez, which appears to have been overtaken by construction. The road leading in was closed and the land around it was posted. We decided not to go beyond the posted sign and so had to DNF this one.

Next up was "Off the Beaten Path." This one took a couple of "semi-circular course corrections" to get to and then, in true Zen Bassmaster fashion, we parked and walked across a grown up vacant lot only to find the cache right next to a nice busy road. Typical. I dropped the geocoin I got at last week's MTGC event here.

Next up was P.O. which was, appropriately, near the post office. Little walk from there but an easy enough find. Not much to say here other than Ashlynne and I took the proximity of the post office to drop off some bills we forgot to mail this morning. I'm sure the electric company will appreciate the side trip, or at least hopefully Easy Reader will (bonus points for anyone who gets the reference).

Next up is Overnight in Rocket City. Yet another set of "semi-circular course corrections" to get to this one. On the way in, Ashlynne spots a little waterfall garden outside and comments on the nice water. Fish, looking the other direction at the sprinkler system, is unimpressed. Finally, on the way out, we show him what Ashlynne was talking about. Picked up a bug here to move northward next week. About the only notable thing here is that we had to make a walking semi-circular course correction on this one as we trailblazed our way down and then discovered that we'd passed the cache right up. Typical.

Our last cache before the event was Chew Chew Cache. A bit of an uphill walk on this one. Not good when Gryphon has an empty stomach. We trudged up the hill and found the cache pretty easily (actually, Fish had it out before I managed to come huffing and puffing up. Between the hunger and the headache I'd been having all day, I wasn't moving too quickly.

From there, we headed for the event, which I will write up later as it's late and I'm tired. Tune in later this week for the exciting adventures of the Zen Bassmasters mucking about with hobbity types, encountering the legendary chupacabra, and working out a health care plan with honorary Bassmaster RN2B.

See you then.

Creepy Caching

2006-09-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

Hear that sound? Listen closely. Hear it? No, you don't. Because it's silence. Pure, blessed silence that can only come from a week of caching without rugrats for a change. Aaah...

This week, we've got yet another geocaching newbie who read our site and still wanted to come with us. P.T. Barnum was right. There's one born every minute...

In this case, it's Fish's friend Jaqks. Again I felt obligated to make sure he'd read our blog (he had) and that he still wanted to come (he does). I figure if I ever have to testify about someone dying on one of our trips, I'll have this to fall back on. "Well, your honor, he read our blog and he still wanted to come. We asked..."

I found out that Jaqks was a rap fan so I dug down into the Gryphon musical archive a bit and dusted off something for him. Our soundtrack of the week is L.L. Cool J's "All World." Old school, baby!

This week we're doing caches in the Chapel Hill/Eagleville area, culminating with two caches that we expect to test what limited abilities we have as a team. The first is It! a 4.5 difficulty cache that has given cachers with far more ability than us fits. The second is "Jog, P.S., This one's for you", which is a member only cache, so I won't post a link. Man's gotta have his principles somewhere.

Before we got started, we decided to take Jaqks over to our cache Wabbit Season to get it for him, take he, Mad Mike, and Chri over to Horse Mountain, since they weren't with us when we got it, and re-try Celebration Station, which we DNF'd a few weeks ago because our GPS units went satanic on us and wouldn't point the way.

Nothing really to note on Horse Mountain. We stood back and let Chri, Jaqks, and Mad Mike find this one and they located it with no major problems. My old business card from the radio station that used to be at this location was still there (not sure why it wouldn't be. I can't imagine anyone wanting it.)

At Wabbit Season, we all sat back and let Jaqks find the cache. The only thing of note here is that the ducks from the pond across the street evidently got pissed when they discovered that we weren't there to feed them bread and proceeded to migrate across the street and surround our van, quacking angrily. It was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie...

We then moved on to Celebration Station. Fortunately, the GPSr behaved today and led us right to the cache. We looked here when we came before, but somehow missed it. Jaqks found the cache. We're hoping this means he's got good enough luck to trump the collective bad luck of the entire group.

Next up is Hazel Cemetary. Nice little spot. The founder of Web school is buried here. Pretty easy find. The only thing of note here is that we saw three dogs in the cemetary just sitting in a row and staring at this one tombstone. It was a little bit creepy, like something out of one of those old Hammer films. Anyway, none of the dogs looked much like Hellhounds (the three tails wagging in unison kind of ruined the effect) so we went on looking. When we finished and were headed back to the car, a little chihuahua, who must have been the leader of the bunch, showed up and they all followed him elsewhere.

Next up was yet another of our revisits of previous DNFs. This one is "Tom's Miniature Donkey Church, which you may remember from our caching trip on little Vorin's birthday a few weeks ago. Then we had to skip it because of a muggle in the parking lot preparing to mow the church lawn. Today, the lot was muggle-less (and looked as if it hasn't been mowed since that day. If any of you church folken read this blog, you really should trim your lawn up a bit). The mini-donkeys in the field next to the church were nowhere to be found but we located the cache. The log was full so we pulled another out of our handy bag o tricks and added it to the old one.

Next up is "Everything you ever wanted to know about..." It's a guardrail cache so I was immediately not happy. I hate guardrail caches. Too exposed, often no good place to park and too predictable. They're just not my thing. But this is one of the cases of the cache description being cool enough to overcome its nature. The cache is GCPACE and I recommend everyone go check it out to learn more than you ever knew (or knew you wanted to know) about guardrails. We see them everyday but, if you're like me, you never think about them unless you have a wreck and smack into one. Pretty easy find.

Next up, since it was on the way, we picked up "Amber Waves of Grain" for Jaqks. I dropped off the "I Found It!" bug here and picked up another. This area still gives me the creeps. Little cemetary in the middle of a cornfield. I read a Stephen King novel with this as the plot and I didn't really want to stay and be killed by Malachi and his little band of goons.

Next up was Abode of the Sun King. It's right at the intersection of four busy roads. We got a lot of stares and one person who stopped and asked us what we were doing. Chri tried to explain geocaching to her but she wasn't getting it. I wish Chri had explained "car seats for small children" to her as she had what looked to be about a 4 year old standing up in the passenger seat... Some people are morons. Anyway, found the cache and moved on in case "mother of the year" got suspicious and called the cops.

Next up was Gitty Up, which is done by my old "pal" JoGPS. It was near the Triune Riding Club and was a pretty easy find. I know I've said things were "scary" a lot today and it's not just a blog theme. There really were a lot of spooky things going on today but this cache had the spookiest. Inside was a travel bug that someone had attached to a talking asparagus from the Veggie Tales. When you pressed a little button behind the asparagus' head he, in this sickening little sweetsie voice, would say "Jesus loves you, just like he loves me! Hehe...!" I know that doesn't sound so horrible but trust me, the combination of the voice, the phrase, the little giggle at the end, and the fact that it's a friggin' vegetable, made it one of the most demonic things I ever heard. It's not just a vegetable, but an asparagus, which ranks right behind brussel sprouts on my list of foods that traumatized me in my childhood. Blech. Ash took the bug, against my protests that it was possessed by satan and that she was opening our home to evil spirits. Ashlynne, who obviously never watched the Exorcist, pronounced the thing "harmless" and brought it along. She said something about placing it in Ice-T but I nixed that. I don't want that evil thing anywhere near any cache of mine.

Next was "College Grove Park." By this time it was starting to rain so we were trying to get as close to the cache as possible before getting out. Found it pretty easily. The only thing of note to happen here was when we were leaving. I put the van in reverse and attempt to see behind me around the wall of fat people in the back seats. Just as I hit the gas to reverse, the train nearby hit its whistle, scaring the bejeebus out of me as I thought I was about to hit something. Once I got my heart back down in my chest, I recognized it for what it was and had to endure picking for the rest of the day from the Bassmasters. They should have been happy Ash wasn't driving. She would have just backed on up until she hit the train...

By now it's raining a pretty good clip. We head to Big Tree in the Woods and discover that a model house has been built near the tree and someone's home. We sent Fish to grab the cache in the rain while I kept watch for people coming out of the house, ready to peel away and let Fish's vaunted people skills keep him out of jail. He signed the log and got back to the car just as someone came out to investigate and we left. I don't expect that cache will be around much longer since it looks like it's becoming a subdivision.

Next was It! We'd heard so much about this one that we were really looking forward to it. I wish I could tell you all about this cache but anything I say would spoil the fun. Let's just say that Angelflye, who placed the cache, is the master. Misdirections abound, decoys lure you away, and the two Stephen King fans in the group tried way too hard to overthink the non-existent connection to the book of the same name. Took six of us an hour but Ashlynne finally figured it out. Absolutely the coolest cache I've ever done. And number two isn't even close. It reminded me of when I saw the Sixth Sense the first time. Once you know where the cache is, you look back at all the clues in the description and realize they were all pointing you in the right way all along. Brilliant. Beyond brilliant. It inspired us. If we can find someplace without too many muggles around, we are already planning a Stephen King's Dark Tower themed cache using what we learned here and through all of our other caches. It should be a true work of evil if we ever get it out. I don't know if we can out-evil It! or not though. I just can't say enough good about this cache. If you're one of our North Alabama readers, it is absolutely worth your drive to come do this cache. Seriously. Tell us you're going and we'll meet you in Fayetteville to go with you. Tserof still needs to get it anyway.

Next was Sledgehammer. Ugly walk to this one, full of tall grass that hid a ton of thorny vines. Pretty much everybody donated some blood to this cache. And what a cache it is. If any of you have done this or plan to do this, please drop me a line to let me know if you've ever seen a bigger cache container because I haven't, not even close. I can't say more than that other than to say that this container's not getting muggled, ever. Not without some heavy equipment. Unfortunately, a nest of wasps had taken up residence on the giant container. I saw the wasps and, being more scared of wasps than anything in the world, invoked the "if you can see the cache, you can claim the cache" rule and sent Fish in to sign the log. While there, Fish found, in the biggest cache container ever, the biggest travel bug ever. "Pet Rock" is just that, a giant rock with a bug glued to it. Fish, none to bright sometimes, picks the thing up and intends to haul it the tenth of a mile out to claim it. After about 5 steps of carrying the 50lb rock, he decides better and puts it back, stirring up the wasps and sending me scurrying back to the van (well, people my size don't really "scurry" but I did waddle faster than normal.)

Next up was our second hard cache of the day, "Jog P.S. This one's for you." It's supposed to be one star easier than It!, but it completely evaded us. We looked everywhere for about an hour, down to individually checking leaves on the bush that our GPS told us it was inside. Mad Mike and Ashlynne somehow got it into their heads that it "jog" was code in someway for an offset cache and started going all DaVinci Code on us with the clues. After about an hour, we DNF'd it and moved on.

Just down the road from "Jog" was "See Rock City." Pretty simple P&G here. None of us but Fish even left the car.

Next is "We've got top men working on it." Nothing much to say here. Quick grab off the road.

Our final cache was "Robert Johnson was Not Here." I'm excited about this one, being a huge Robert Johnson fan. The location is just bizarre. I don't know how to describe it. I wish we'd gotten pictures. It was kind of a crossroads, but with little turnoffs and turnarounds paved all around it. It looked like the paving crew dropped acid before doing it. Anyway, fairly easy cache to find once we could take our eyes off the mess that was the road.

It even inspired me for something to do with a TB I had lying around the house waiting on a mission. Meet Travelin' Bug Blues

He should be in Wabbit Season sometime this week as I sent him home with Fish to be placed there.

But the story doesn't end there. On Sunday, we went to the Middle Tennessee Geocacher's Club event in Chapel Hill and met a lot of nice folks, including Monkeybrad and our favorite cache hider and honorary Zen Bassmaster Scoot the Frog (who is much too sweet to be saddled with that ignomy but we've given it to her anyway). Not a lot to report here other than Brad took pity on us and took a group of us (not just Zen Bassmasters) who had DNF'd "Jog" and helped us out. Evil. Pure evil. He seems like a nice enough guy to talk to but trust me. This cache proves he's evil. Not evil on the level of the talking dogmatic asparagus, but evil nonetheless. If you take our advice and come do It!, do this one too. They together represent the heart of evil among Tennessee caches.

Next week we have a Huntsville run planned. We're going to hit Thornton Research Park, which we've heard from some of our Bama folks is one of Huntsville's more evil caches. Should be fun. It all culminates in the North Alabama Meet and Greet. With my plans for the Dark Tower cache I plan to pick the little hobbity brains of the Fellowship for ideas. See you next week.

-Gryph

Drinking my Caches Goodbye

2006-09-05T17:38:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being late with this week's post. I've had some real life stuff going on the last few days and haven't really felt like trying to be funny. This is going to be a relatively short post anyhow because, frankly, we didn't do much this week.

We wanted to run by Jack Daniels Distillery to do the tour because we have a bug that wants to be photographed with fire stations and we figured the little fire station they have at Jack Daniels is pretty unique and one they wouldn't get otherwise. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of caches in the general Lynchburg/Tullahoma/Fayetteville area that we haven't done yet. Also, we had Little Vorin with us again this week so we were doing low impact caches, shrinking our list even more.

Since my blog last week about having SO much fun riding with the kiddies, my kind loving friends (I take back none of the Judas references from last week) decided to move Little V's carseat into my van and let Tserof ride with his parents. Having ridden with Tserof many times in the past, I thought I got the best of the deal, took the hyper 4 year-old, and let Fish and Chri deal with "Too Much Information Man". My only caveat was that we would NOT be playing "The Wheels on the Bus" or "Little Bunny Foo Foo." My car, my music, meaning Little V got to listen to my MP3 mix the whole day, ranging from John Prine to Iron Maiden (more on Iron Maiden later).

First up, on the way to Jack Daniels for the tour, was Fork in the Road. Not too much to report on this one. Little micro out in the middle of nowhere. Found it pretty easily. Little V was not impressed as he is not a fan of caches that don't contain toys for him to loot. Signed the log and moved on.

Second was On Liberty Hill. Little bit of a hill on this one but a beautiful area. This one was an ammo box so Little V got his toy finally. Don't remember what he took, just that he wanted everything. I had Little V listening to Iron Maiden's "Wasted Years" on the way over and spent the whole drive to it trying to teach him to do the "forked finger" sign, scream "Iron Maiden!" and bang his head for his mother. Strangely, Little V, the child who will talk the ears of friends, family, strangers, dogs, and walls if given the chance, picked this moment to become shy, meekly squeaking "ironmaiden" before scurrying behind me. Pitiful. That boy isn't nearly metal enough. Fortunately, I've got the rest of the day to work on him.

Third was Lost Creek. Beautiful area by the lake. By now, Tserof was doing something annoying (don't remember what. With Tserof, it all kind of runs together) so we threatened to throw him in the lake. Since he was riding with Fish and Chri, I wasn't worried about getting water in my car and was all for the idea. No one else seemed to want to help me and since Tserof weighs more than me, I couldn't lift him alone. We dropped a couple of bugs in the cache, got Little V his toy, and moved on. Little V still refused to do the Iron Maiden! bit, but did seem to enjoy ZZ Top (although teaching him the lyrics to "Tush" to sing for his granny didn't work out. Pity...)

Next up was Anderton Bridge at the Bend. Found the cache pretty easily, although Ashlynne dropped it and nearly lost it in the lake. Climbing down to retrieve it was the worst part of this one. We weren't sure she was going to get back up and jokingly told her she might have to swim over to the nearby pier to be picked up. She was not amused. By this time, I was mostly insane, having listened to about 10 miles of Little V and Mad Mike play the "stop copying me" game which, oddly, sounded like a typical episode of Hannity and Colmes. I tried to distract him by getting him to sing "I Ain't Drunk, I'm Just Drinkin'" with me, but I don't think Little V's an Albert Collins fan. Pity.

At this point, Chri felt it necessary to point out to me that kids often repeat things that are said around them. "I would hope so", I thought. Otherwise, all my work here is for naught...

Next up was Tims Ford Dam Overlook which, oddly enough, overlooks Tims Ford Dam. Easy cache. Right by the cars. Nothing of too much interest here, other than Mad Mike hiding the baseball that Little V found in another cache, then giving it to him later as a gift, much to V's delight. Glad to see I'm not the only one trying to scar the child's mental health.

Next was Wayside Creek. This one gave us some fits finding it, but we finally did. Dropped in a couple of more bugs from our bug hunt last week and moved on.

Finally, was our trip to Jack Daniels. Unfortunately, we somehow forgot that it was Labor Day weekend and, on top of that, all of the people who were in Shelbyville for the Walking Horse Celebration had apparently decided to drop in too. If there was ever a definition of "too many muggles", this was it. We decided to skip the tour for this week and just hunt for the cache. I did stop by one of the gift shops to get some stuff for a couple of new bugs that I planned to release. More on that later.

Our GPS units both decided to get drunk off the whiskey fumes and give us crazy coordinates in opposite directions. We walked around for a while, made friends with a kitty cat that apparently lives in the area and joined us for the cache (until Little V dropped him on his head, at which point he decided to try his luck with the other tourists).

We tried to be as discreet as possible, making our way casually through the ten gallon cowboy hats and studded boots (did I mention I hate horse show people?). Finally, we rebooted both of our GPSr and at least got them to point the same way. Took us a few minutes to find the cache, but we finally did.

From there, we went back to Fayetteville to place our own cache, the second in the History of Lincoln County series. It's GCY3FD for anyone who wants to check it out. We're pretty proud of our hide here so we're curious to see if it poses any challenge to some of our "pro cacher" friends from the Dixie Cachers board. Bring it on, Frodo. We may or may not give you a bit of a search, but I promise it's not a key holder under a lamp skirt (it's also not a 400 ft straight down hike, for the record).

Once we got it hid, we dropped a couple of bugs in it, including one of my new ones called B-Double-E-Double-R-U-N. I'd give you the link, but gc.com is down apparently so go search it yourself if you're interested.

Again, not much to the day. Probably not one of my best posts and I apologize for that. Next week I've been promised it will be adults only and we'll be doing some harder caches, including one 4.5 difficulty cache, GCK1DT. Should make for interesting blogging.

Stay tuned.

Snakes on a Cache

2006-08-29T18:12:00.000-07:00

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.

Birthday Cache

2006-08-21T17:38:00.000-07:00

This week we had to delay our caching trip for a few hours because Fish's wife rudely insisted that Fish attend his son's birthday party. The nerve of some people...

The son in question is Vorin, who you may remember as the World's Most Fabulous Secret Agent from our post Geocaching Hootenanny. Here's a birthday picture, for those of you who like that kind of thing.

Since we were in Murfreesboro for the party anyway, we decided to just do some caches around the area. Our crew this week is me, Fish, Mad Mike, and Ashlynne. Tserof was absent today, saying something about having to work or something. The nerve of some people... Our soundtrack for today is "Live and Loud" by Cross Canadian Ragweed.

Our first was a multi called 4-H TB Inn. Ashlynne, being an old 4-H vet, was happy about doing a cache that was set out as a 4-H project. The multi seemed to be right in the parking lot of the 4-H building, which was great for the rest of us, having had enough snakes and rocks to do us for a few weeks. Nothing terribly eventful in the first two. Mad Mike found the first one and I found the second. I won't give away the hide other than to say it's a good thing we've been listening to Frodo on all those events as I didn't even know those things weren't screwed in. The third promised to be a "gallon jar". We figured that would be an easy find right outside a parking lot and headed for the spot, only to find... rocks.

We hate rocks. Days of nightmares from Green Mountain come back to us. Still, these rocks seem harmless enough but they certainly don't seem big enough to hide a mayo jar under. We cast about and finally decide to send Fish back to look at the coordinates he put in from the last ones and he literally stumbled over it. Very, very cool camo on this one. Simple, but it sure fooled us. We'd have probably DNF'd it if we hadn't tripped over it. Great example of being able to give urban park and grabs some challenge.

Unfortunately, there were no travel bugs in the travel bug inn, so we dropped off a couple we picked up at the Sheffield event and the one Rick618 dropped in Wabbit Season this week.

Next up was Puckett's Guard. Pretty unremarkable one here. Park and Grab right beside the road. You know when the Zen Bassmasters say it's easy, it's pretty darn easy.

Next was From Tiny Acorns. It promised an old historical house but, as we headed in the direction of it, it looked more like it would promise a mugging. Through the projects we drove, thinking that maybe we didn't want this cache anyway. But we pressed on and found, right in the middle, a little park. On the other side of the park was... you've figured it out if you've been reading this blog for very long... a road to the park that didn't lead you through the ghetto.

We headed for the treeline and found the cache relatively easily. We also found our first injury as Mad Mike somehow managed to ram part of a bush INTO his ear. Not sure how you manage that, but he did. Fortunately, it wasn't too serious and we pressed on.

Next up was Benevolence, which was advertised as a cemetary cache, but seemed to point right to the railroad tracks. We pressed on, wondering if we had the coordinates right or if the cache was listed wrong. Sure enough, we found a little cemetary near the tracks. Or, at least, we found the sign for a cemetary. The whole area was completely grown up and looked like it had been abandoned for years. I did some research just now and found this link that gives the history. Kind of sad.

Next up was "It's a Party!", which was by an old mill. Neat little spot and an easy enough find. Nothing terribly remarkable here except for looking at the old mill area. Go check it out if you like old stuff or history.

Next was Chief Black Fox. Another fairly easy find near the highway. The only remarkable thing here is that we found my first tracker bug, called "An Old Memory." It was a bug attached to an old ram stick. Being a geek, the RAM drew me in. The bug wants to visit historical places, so we're either going to run it by the Berlin Springs cache or we may place it in one of our "History of Lincoln County" caches (more on that in a bit).

Next was Millersville Cemetary. Another park and grab. Very easy find. Again, nothing terribly remarkable here.

Our next cache was "Prosthesis" and it was another great hide. Again, I won't give away the find other than to tell you that everything you need to locate the cache is listed in the title (well, except the coordinates, which are on the website, but you know what I mean). Someone did some work on this one and it showed. Awesome hide and a cache I'd recommend going to do if you get a chance.

Our next was "Amber Waves of Grain." This was another that confused us in the beginning. It promised to be a cemetary cache, but the coordinates seemed to lead right into a cornfield. We pressed on anyway. Sure enough, right in the middle of the cornfield, is a little cemetary. Well kept up too. We commented that the name of the cache should not be "Amber Waves of Grain" but "Children of the Corn" as that's what it looked more like. We joked that all of the gravestones were of people 25 or younger. Cache was an easy enough find.

Our final cache of the day was Tom's Miniature Donkey Church. The name alone was enough to make us want to do it. Unfortunately, it was not meant to be, as the caretaker of the little church there chose that moment to mow. Drats! Foiled by muggles.

But, all in all, a good day. We found all but one and that one wasn't really our fault.

The other news this week is that we've placed the first of our History of Lincoln County series. The first is not terribly historical, but a good jumping off point. The cache listing can be found here. Go check it out if you're in the area and drop us a line about what you think. I'd tell you to stop in for a cup of the really good coffee if the place is open, but according to the listing-Nazis at geocaching.com, that's advertising and an illegal cache, so go to the general area and find the cache, go inside and check out the history book, say hi to the owner (who was fascinated by geocaching when we got permission for the hide). The odors from inside will do the rest.

Until next week...

-Gryph

Jolly Green Descent into Hell- Part 2

2006-08-08T18:16:00.000-07:00

I'm back, with part two of the worst day of geocaching we've had yet. It started off much like normal, getting lost, being hot, eating. But it got much, much worse.

When I left off last night, we were in the land trust parking area with the infamous Frodo, who was telling us to call him if it "gets to be too much for you." As I said last night, this should have been a clue coming from Frodo, but as I also said last night, we're not real bright.

Before we set out, we decided to hit a cache right next to the parking area, one that had been hidden by Frodo himself, Ledges Edges. With Frodo looking on (and probably laughing inside at our incompetence), we looked around and finally found the cache.

Yay! First find of the day! Things are looking up!

Famous last words... In retrospect, I think Frodo may have taken pity on us, leading us to an easy cache so we'd go to our deaths with a feeling of accomplishment.

The next thing that should have been a clue to us is, just as we were leaving, another group pulled up, not to join us in doing the caches, but apparently to join Frodo in seeing us off. A smart group would have seen this for what it was; a wake. Again, we're not very bright, so we pressed on.

The entrance to the trail was across the road so we encountered our first difficulty there. After an entertaining game of "Fat People Frogger" we made it to the entrance of the trail... which was almost straight up. "I've got a bad feeling about this...", I said in a moment of clarity. But then I started up the slope anyway, passing the moment of reason off as indigestion.

We walked for a bit, commenting on the fact that this "mostly downhill" trek sure had a lot of uphill climbing. Finally, we make it to the first cache, "Jolly Green Toothbrush" and it was definitely a good one. Big, custom made cache. Easy to find because it was friggin huge! Really cool cache. As we signed the log, we heard a distinctive rattling noise. Everyone froze immediately except Ashlynne, who couldn't figure out why the rest of us were suddenly doing the Vogue.

As most of you who have read these blogs before know by now, Ashlynne is from New York, a part of the country so frigid that the only cold-blooded reptilian creature able to survive there is Senator Hillary Clinton. So Ashlynne, who ironically is the one of us most afraid of snakes, had no idea that she was listening to the sound of an irritated rattlesnake.

"Rattlesnake...", Mad Mike said, still not moving. "Over there. Damn, he's a big one..."
"How close?", I asked, still frozen.
"About 15 feet away. Peek around the rock and you'll see him. He's a big one."
"No, that's ok," I said, backing slowly away from the area where Mike pointed. "I think hearing the rattlesnake is enough for me. I don't really have to see him."

Everyone else agreed and we gingerly replaced the cache and left the rattler to his business. Now remember, at this point we're still not terribly far from the entrance. So did we go back, taking the rattlesnake's warning as a sign that maybe this isn't for us. No, no we didn't. We pressed on. We were tired already and our big backpack full of water was going away at an alarming rate, but why would that concern us? We're the Zen Bassmasters! We survived Monte Sano with no water at all.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

By the time we reached the next cache, Jolly Green Wristwatch, we were all beat, even Fish, who is our "outdoorsman". Worse, the Wristwatch was 200ft straight uphill. We sent Ashlynne and Mad Mike up to sign the log and get the picture, while the rest of us tried to keep ourselves from having a heart attack.

At this point, we decided to screw the caches. We didn't care anymore. Not even Fish, who is usually a slave-driver in search of caches. We vowed to hit only caches that were along the trail or near it, no uphill climbing, no digging through briars, just focusing on survival.

And focus we did. We tried to conserve our water but we just got too thirsty and soon we were alarmed to see that we only had about 1 bottle each left. We began to wonder, if a full backpack wasn't enough, could we even bring enough water on a trek like this to have enough? More backpacks equal more weight equal more exertion, equal more thirst. Finally, we decided that the best bet was to fit Fish's Great Dane Barley for saddlebags, figuring if he carries 1/3 of his weight, he'd carry enough to get us through. Course, he'd probably also take out after the rattlesnake and then we'd have to figure how to tote a 120 lb snakebit dog off the mountain...

The biggest problem we had wasn't the elevation, as the trek was mostly down (with some unpleasant ups in between), it was the fact that the trail was mostly made up of rocks. We twisted our ankles like crazy, bruised our feet on the sharp rocks, and were constantly off-balance. It was just wearing us down and soon, all of us looked like Tserof in that picture from the last post (which was not posed, for those who asked. It was completely candid and actually before we got to the worst of it at the end).

We noticed Jolly Green Button was near the trail so we decided (very apathetically I might add) that we'd give it a try. Again, Mad Mike volunteered to scout for it and tell us how the trail was. As he's poking around we hear "Oh shit!" and see Mike backing away from a rock. Yep, another rattler. This one, fortunately, was either dead or asleep. Mike didn't seem interested in finding out, or in finding the button anymore so we moved on.

On the way, we saw a neat rock formation on the trail. Here's a picture...

We discussed what this might be. Fish jokingly started talking about some sort of Indian symbol. I told them I was pretty sure it was Hobbit trail-language for "Abandon Ye All Hope Who Enter Here."

Finally, we decided upon what we think is right. We decided it'd been set up by the folks who did this trail in the morning hours. They knew we were coming and we figure they set this up as the over/under on where we'd die. I'd say we proudly walked past the over/under rock, hopefully depriving some gambling hobbits of their winnings but, honestly, not much was funny by then so we just took a picture to prove we'd passed it and trundled on.

At this point, Tserof remembers that Frodo told us there was a stream somewhere in this area and started lamenting that we hadn't found it yet. We walked on with Tserof talking about the stream being dried up and all he really wanted was a little moisture to put on his head.

Finally, we did find the stream, really a trickle, and we still nearly had to stop Tserof swimming in it. It was kind of sad, but we were all so hot and tired by then that even a bunch of muddy water over our heads felt so nice it was like heaven. We rested there for a while until we thought we could go on.

Near the stream was a cache called RN2B's First that we decided to grab. We like RN2B. We've met her at a couple of events and she "gets" us. No putting caches under briars, no putting caches 300 ft straight down a mountain, no tying caches to rattlesnakes, just good quality caches, hidden within easy walk of the trail, and right where you think they would be.

RN2B, we'd make you an honorary Bassmaster but we like you too much to curse you that way.

We got the cache and Ashlynne decided to place her Jeep Travel Bug in it, figuring if people were willing to hike the mountain to get it, they could (and someone did, Frodo, the next morning).

We hit one more cache, Quarter Mile Granny Gear, on our way down. I'm sorry I'm not my usual descriptive self here but the rest of the hike was kind of a blur. I remember walking, hurting, encouraging Tserof (who looked like death, not even warmed over, just room temperature death), hurting more, being thirsty, and eventually, getting to the bottom.

We looked like crack addicts on free needle day heading for the cooler. Never has water been so worshipped. Never has water tasted so good. In fact, I'm going to try to recap Tserof's little speech as close to word for word as possible, as it very nicely sums up our thoughts on the day.

Warning to my teachers who plan to use this blog for their classes. You might want to leave this part off your lesson plan. We were too tired to censor ourselves.

Here you go, the wisdom of Tserof...

"This shit right here is some good shit. You never know how good water tastes until something like this. I'm telling you. This is the best stuff ever right here. I can't believe I don't drink it more. I love water."

And if that doesn't sum up the Zen Bassmaster philosophy more than anything, I don't know what does.

Next week, we aren't caching but instead are planning to scout out some locations in Lincoln County to place some caches. We did some research using the "History of Lincoln County" book in the local coffee shop and we think we've got some great historical caches to place, we just have to see what types of caches the areas support. If anything "blog worthy" happens, I'll write about it. Otherwise, stay tuned next week as I may pull out a "history of the Zen Bassmasters" column for filler, since we've had lots of questions at the meet and greet events about it.

Stay tuned.

Jolly Green Descent to Hell- August 5, 2006 Part 1

2006-08-07T17:02:00.000-07:00

For those of you who have lamented that we'll eventually get better at this geocaching thing, thereby making for less interesting blogging, this week should put you at ease. This week, we headed up to Green Mountain in Huntsville on the recommendation of several area cachers who said we should check out the "Jolly Green" series of caches. If we had doubts that the hobbits and hobbit sympathizers were trying to kill us, this week erased it.

Actually, that's not really fair. While the hobbity types did sing the virtues of the Jolly Green caches, they also told us it was "a bit of a climb" and Frodo even met us at the entrance, drew us a map, and gave us his number to call if we "got to a point where you can't go any more." You'd think that sentence alone, from the person who nearly killed us on Monte Sano mountain, would have given us pause.

You'd think, but you'd be wrong...

Actually, the first thing that should have given us pause was when Fish, our eternal planner, sent us a mapped out list of caches in the area, mounting up into a 2.7 mile trip. 2.7 miles is around what Mad Mike and I do at the gym every night walking. It's more than Tserof's ever done more than a couple of times. But, being idiots, we decided that it was almost all downhill, we'd bring plenty of water, and we'd stop frequently to rest ourselves.

Little did we know...

The day started off as usual for the Zen Bassmasters, with us having to turn around. We planned to park Fish's Jeep at the bottom of the trail and my van at the top so we wouldn't have to hike back up (the only smart thing we did). Unfortunately, this wasn't as simple a plan as it would seem. By now, you should know the routine here but, for any new readers, it went something like this...

"Is that the parking lot?"
"I can't tell... Maybe."
"Should I stop?"
"Don't stop here."
"But isn't that the church?"
"I think it is..."
"But we're going to the top!"
"Without Fish and Tserof?..."
"Yes we're... oh..."

By that time, the church had passed us. No problem, I thought. I'll just turn around. Unfortunately, after the church, there's not a heck of a lot of places to turn around until WAAAY up on the top. It ended up being for the best though as the "top" parking area was not well marked and we'd have missed it if we hadn't seen Frodo's car there.

We hurried afraid he might leave before we got back. No fear. Frodo saw the "low rider minivan" and knew it had to be us. We went back and got Tserof and Fish, then headed back up.

The second thing that should have given us pause was that it was HOT. I mean hot hot hot. Hot to a point where "hot" becomes a four letter word. We commented on it, but being idiots, we didn't say "hey, let's do the 3 mile hike in October..." We said "oh, it'll be cooler once we get in the woods." Besides, we had an entire backpack full of water. What could go wrong?

What indeed...

That's all I can do for today, but I promise more very soon. Next time on Adventures in Geocaching, we have rattlesnakes, dehydration, hobbit gambling, and Tserof looking like this...

See you soon...

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

2006-07-31T17:57:00.000-07:00

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."

Meet the Fatsos- July 25, 2006

2006-07-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

Not your normal post this week because this isn't the Zen Bassmasters' normal cache run. Instead, we got invited, by Frodo of all people, to the Beat the Heat Meet and Greet down in Huntsville. Since this event featured two of the Bassmasters' favorite things, caching and Chinese food, we made plans to attend.

We got there a bit late and noticed that the restaurant parking lot was packed. "You think all these people are here for the event?", I asked. We assumed not and that the food at the Royal Buffet was just good enough to keep a crowd. Well, the food WAS very good (it's a favorite Huntsville stop of our crew) but we were wrong in that the full lot was mostly folks there for the event. I think Frodo said over 30 and you could sure tell it. The poor server looked panicked when we told him we were with the geocaching group and muttered under his breath "they tell us only 20..."

Because of the overfill, we ended up sitting in another section. We were away from the crowd but nearer the buffet. Apparently these Chinese folks know us...

After we got our food, we used our usual method of delegating responsibility (which consists of yelling "not it!" and sending the last guy to yell), we sent Tserof, who lingered too long at the buffet and missed the "not its" altogether to introduce us.

Completely by chance, the first person Tserof walks up to is Frodo himself, who is a lot nicer in person than he is while you're at the bottom of Monte Sano. In fact, he and all of the Fellowship were almost too nice. These were the guys who tried to kill us on our very first cache, so we were wary. After all, those hobbits are a naturally sneaky lot and might be buttering us up, all the easier to lead us to our deaths and serve us up for their elevenses meal.

We went back to our table and I have to say I was quite flattered with then number of people who stopped by to tell us how much they were entertained by the journal. I question their taste, but appreciate their support nonetheless. We even had a couple of people ask if all that stuff actually happened to us. Trust me, it did. I'm not a good enough writer to make up something as bizarre as the stuff we get ourselves into on our own.

The coolest thing that happened was that we were given what is officially the greatest travel bug in the history of bugs. Meet SA Space Bear...

Space Bear originated in South Africa and has been travelling the world visiting as many space-related areas as possible. He already has a visitor's badge from Kennedy and another from Huntsville. Space Rocket gave it to us hoping we could get it to Arnold Engineering. Space Rocket, we're still looking at that but we've also got some other ideas. They may or may not come to fruition and they may take us a few weeks to set up, but if we pull it off, we're hoping to get Space Bear another milestone on his journey. At worst, we'll get him onto the property of Arnold and drop him in a cache there. At best, we're going to be able to send him someplace much cooler. Cross your fingers.

We also got a cool geocoin that someone asked us to drop off in Nashville next time we're up there, as it plans to head to Pennsylvania. We've got ideas for that too, and should be able to manage that easily, as it doesn't require getting security level clearance for a stuffed toy.

I'm sorry for anyone whose name I have forgotten. I suck at names. It was a pleasure to meet you all.

After the meal, we all decided to head over to UAH for a little bit of "night caching". As we've never done a night cache, we were all in. Again, we had a bit of fear as this involved going into darkened woods with hobbits who have already shown us a homicidal streak, but anything for a cache.

Of course, this wouldn't be a tale of the Zen Bassmasters if there wasn't a bobble somewhere down the line. This time it consisted of Ash and I thinking Mike brought the flashlight, Mike thinking Tserof brought the flashlight, and Tserof thinking we brought the flashlight. As night caches involve shining a flashlight off reflectors, this posed a problem.

But, again, this wouldn't be a Bassmaster tale if we didn't press on anyway...

Out we went and, for some reason, the gathered masses wanted us to lead. They all claim to have read the blog, but none have apparently learned from it. You don't let us lead anything. We're the shortest route to a DNF. And we didn't have a flashlight.

Finally, they let the couple of kids in the group lead us. Smart choice. The kids are already WAY more competent than all of us put together.

Problem 2 came when we fat people had trouble keeping up with the youngsters, us being 400 lbs and all. So Mike and I kept falling out of the range of the flashlight. This was compounded by the fact that Tserof, ahead of us, had his GPS screen pointed right at us. It provided no useful light, but the screen was enough to screw up any night vision we might have developed.

Mike and I finally decided that we might as well do things the hard way, as usual, and press on without light. Y'know, briars are sneaky things. They jump out and grab you as you walk past and, if you happen to be blind, they don't even have to bother. I got snared on the legs more times than I could count. Mike managed to impale his face on one. But we made it to the cache! We looked like we'd been through a Taipei Death Match when we got there, but we got there.

Once we got out, all the time watching for hobbit traps (we figure hobbits set traps kind of like Ewoks so we were looking for swinging logs and the sort), the lovely RN2B directs us to one of her caches nearby. She promises it's easy. Apparently she doesn't read the blog either.

But with her guidance and a little luck (where was that stuff on Monte Sano?) we located it and logged our second cache of the night.

By then it was getting late and we had to mosey on back to Tennessee so we said our goodbyes, hoped to see folks again, and even made tentative plans to go attempt to conquer Monte Sano again, with the Fellowship in tow! Yep. We're suicidal...

Next up for the Bassmasters is the Shoal's Meet and Greet on Saturday. Thanks to Cyrusel and everyone who has asked us to come and posted message about looking forward to meeting the Zen Bassmasters in person. We'll be there. Just look for the herd of stampeding water buffalo. That'll be us.

Until then...

Geocaching Hootenanny: 7/22/06

2006-07-23T10:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Roll with the Caches, Part 2

2006-07-17T20:19:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm back. Deadwood was great last night, as was Entourage, but it's back down to business now. Here's the second part of our adventures for the week.

Our next cache was one called Checking Station, which was a pretty good name for it since it was right behind the Hunter's Checking Station. We were greeted with another of the signs telling us that we WILL enjoy ourselves in the nature area. Again, Mad Mike and I made with the Guantanamo jokes, much to the displeasure of Fish, who, politically, is slightly to the right of Hitler. We headed into the woods to look for the cache, which had the clue "Be sure to log your find." The guys began to complain about the useless clue but I had an idea. "Hey, wasn't that the clue a few weeks ago at Watchtower? Is it the same guy?" Sure enough it was. So as the rest of the gang wandered around, I headed for a likely looking log and, sure enough, it was there. See, kids, it pays to remember your history. Inside the cache, we found quite possibly the coolest prize in the history of caches. Contained inside was something the older of us in the group had heard of, but never seen in person. Contained inside was a child of the 80's version of the Holy Grail.

Inside was K-Tel's "Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute." If you grew up in the 1980's, you smiled when you read that. Admit it, you did. Zamfir might be the "Master of the Pan Flute" but he's also the "Master of the Crappy Late Night Commercial" as K-Tel ran millions of commercials for Zamfir, always accompanied by that awful, drowsy, sappy flute music. Tserof and Ashlynne, younger than the rest of us, had never heard of Zamfir. Mad Mike explained it best. "He got overtaken by Kenny G in the 90's for the 'music to put you to sleep' crowd."

We didn't take the Zamfir tape, partially because we had nothing to leave and partially because it just didn't seem right. If we took it, what Grail would errant knights search for in their caching quests? What pleasures would we be denying future cachers if we kept Zamfir for ourselves? What potential insomniac cachers are searching valiantly for their cure, already having become immune to the ministrations of Yanni, all for naught as we took their only cure? It just didn't seem right.

Reluctantly leaving Zamfir, we moved on to the next cache, Boat Ramp. Once again, the naming was right on as there was a boat ramp about 30 yards from the cache. The water looked tempting in the near 100 degree weather and Tserof seemed ready to dive in, but I suddenly remembered that my dad had stopped taking me fishing at Wood's Reservoir as a child because the government had issued a warning about eating the catfish due to the contamination in the water. Not wanting to see Tserof grow an extra set of toes, I quickly steered him away from the water and toward the cache. This one was listed as a mini but was more like a micro, a small paintball tube with nothing more than a log inside. I guess it's just as well. After Zamfir, any prizes would have been a letdown.

Next up was Prairie Plains Crossing. **Warning. This one contains some spoilers for the cache's location. If you plan to hit this cache and want to be surprised, don't read on. I usually try to avoid giving away cache locations but in this case, the only way to illustrate the sheer idiocy of our team is to give away the general location of the cache. You've been warned**
We parked the minivan beside the road in but Fish decided his oh so manly 4X4 could handle the rough road in. Fish was, unfortunately, wrong as he discovered wheel-deep in a mudhole that his 4WD was not currently functional. Hilarity ensued as we watched Fish attempt to get his (now) 2WD Jeep out of the mud. Needless to say, Fish decided once he got out of the mud that maybe we'd just hike in from there. And hike we did. Over brambles and under. Through dense foliage and around to... the bridge about 50 yards from our cars. We're now under the bridge, surrounded by brush, and searching like crazy for the cache in a pile of rocks, a pile of brush, and a pile of weeds. Finally, Mad Mike climbs up onto the bridge and looks around the area surrounding the bridge. Sure enough, right on the bridge, easily accessible from the road, 50 yards from the car, is the cache. We take a moment to ponder the fact that we've just spent about 45 minutes scratching ourselves up, nearly needing a tow truck for Fish's Jeep, climbing up slopes, fighting mosquitos, and overturning rocks for what should have been a park and grab. Yes, we ARE the Zen Bassmasters. Doing it the hard way... because we can!" On the way back to the car (and beyond, since walking to the car took all of 30 seconds) I said "Did the GPS go screwy?", wondering why it didn't point right to the bridge. "Oh no," Fish tells me, "It did point toward the bridge. We just didn't think it could be that easy..." *sigh* Yes, we are all morons. Myself included. As a great man (Obi Wan Kenobi) once said, "Who's the bigger idiot? The fool, or the fool who follows him?"

Our final cache is "East of Nowhere." By now we're pretty tired, especially Ash and I, who have been outside pretty much constantly since 5 am. Driving to the cache, which promised difficulty in even finding roads to get there, Tserof notices the cache is about a .5 mile hike in, the last 300 yards of which promise to be "impenetrable brambles". Great. By now, my legs are jelly and I'm seeing spots (did I mention the van's AC doesn't work?). I'm not sure I'm up for a mile of walking, especially not through "impenetrable brambles" which brings up visions of last week's caches, the scars of which we all still bear (literally. Fish's legs still look like he had gotten a pedicure from Jason Vorhees). But, since Fish and Mad Mike were gung ho to try it and since I am the group's scribe, I figured what the hell. Besides, I figure a mile of walking at the end of the day in near 100 degree heat will make for some interesting fodder for the blog. Yes, Gentle Readers, I suffer so you don't have to. I ask only that you remember this on my birthday. I take Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, and will even return them to you in 4 to 6 months when I've finished with them.

Anyhow, we lucked out as most of the half mile was on a well-used ATV trail. The needed "mule team" to get in that was advertised in the description was not needed at all. It winded us a little but you have to remember, we're all 400lbs. Getting out of bed in the morning winds us. On we trek, dodging the ATVs speeding past, until Fish tells us we need to divert off the path. "Great", we think. "Here comes the 200 yards of impassable brambles." Well, the path was littered with brambles but anyone who rated them "impassable" needs to visit a random Frodo cache to learn the true meaning of pain. Onward we pressed, only slightly bloodier for the trip until we came to where the cache was supposed to be... right onto a road. Yes, once again we'd traveled through weeds, logs, and briars, only to come out on a nice flat road... You see a pattern here? We look around and see a beer can stuck onto the branch of a tree. Aha! A clue. The five of us, all budding Sherlocks, look around the area where the can is, to no avail. At this time, the GPS' have both had some time to talk to more sats and are now agreeing that the cache is in the middle of a field of corn on the other side of the road. Surely not, we think. Finally, Fish re-checks the coordinates we've entered against the PDA and, sure enough, we've entered them wrong. We re-input the right coordinates and the GPS' dutifully point us in the right direction... about 200 yards back the way we came. Yes, we did trample through 200 yards of bramble for nothing... for the second time today. "Boldly Going Where No One Saw Any Need to Go Before." It's the ZB way...

Back we go through the brambles and bush and the GPS units lead us right to the cache, which is about 20 feet off the trail. Did I mention we're idiots? We're idiots. And the worst part is, during all this, all I can think is "At least I've got something interesting for the blog."

As we walked back out Mad Mike and I engaged in our favorite game, baiting Fish with political discussions. Ash held back and played the role of coach, attempting to get Tserof to the car without dying.

Fortunately, everyone made it to the car alive and we moved toward home, tired but satisfied with our day's accomplishments.

In fact, speaking of accomplishment, this is the first ZB trip with a 100% find rate! Yay for us.

Tune in next week when, hopefully, we can continue our streak. Next week we have some friends with us, some of which have some varying states of disability, as well as Fish's 3 year-old and non-caching wife, my cousin. So we're doing all terrain 1 and 2 caches, culminating with a cookout at Berlin Springs park (which we discovered a few weeks ago while doing caches) to celebrate Ash's getting a new job.

Until next week, I leave you with a tribute to our patron saint...

Roll With the Caches- July 15, 2006- Part 1

2006-07-16T15:51:00.000-07:00

Another week, another set of caches. This week, Ash and I had a yard sale in the morning hours so, after a long morning of sitting outside in the heat begging people to give us pennies for our crap, we were already sweaty and ready to cache. Our usual crew met up with Fish in Estill Springs for some caching around Woods Reservoir. Today's a big day as Mad Mike became the second Zen Bassmaster to get a GPS unit and this will be her virgin run. We actually looked kind of funny walking around today as two GPS units and a PDA made us look like Away Teams from an episode of Star Trek. All we needed was someone with pointy ears and a guy with a red shirt who dies. The soundtrack for this week is Fleetwood Mac: Vintage Years Live.

We had planned to do our first cache in Estill Springs Park but there was some sort of event going on which included a $5 charge for parking. The presence of large numbers of muggles combined with our overall cheap-ness (remember, I'm the guy who won't pay for premium access) made us decide to give it a skip for the day.

Next up was a cache called Walk the Walk. Right off we encountered problems. Mike's GPS, which had been almost completely in sync with Tserof's on the drive up, suddenly decided that the cache was on the other side of the highway, about a quarter mile from where Tserof's was pointing. We quickly checked the coordinates to be sure that both had the same ones (and the right ones, crosschecked against the PDA) and they did. Tserof suggested a reboot, remembering that seemed to help his when it was doing similar things a few weeks back. Mike reboots and his GPS still insists the cache is on the other side of the highway. We consult the paperwork again and decide that we'll go with Tserof's GPS reading. We head down the trail to where Tserof's GPS led us and found the cache in pretty easy fashion.

Cache 2 was called Sun Drop. It was a park and grab right off a road near a convenience store. Ash found this one and, I have to say, it's one of the best camo jobs I've seen so far. I won't go into more details so as not to spoil anyone's find but suffice it to say it went well beyond the normal grey paint or duct tape approach. If you're in the area, go check it out. It's an easy grab, but the good hide made it a challenge. Nice for us large folk, especially those of us who have been outside yard sale-ing since 5 am.

Next up is The Dam Elk River Cache which, ironically, is right by a dam. Turning on to the road, we were faced with two signs. One said "No Through Traffic Permitted" and promised it was enforced by the Air Force (as this was around Arnold AFB). The second one said "Through Traffic Permitted." We pondered this for a moment and decided that we were willing to risk MPs in search of a cache. Onward we went. As soon as we got out of the car, we knew something was odd. "Who farted?", I asked, looking directly at Mad Mike. Mike, who is world reknowned for his impressively odorous flatulence, insisted it wasn't him. We both looked at Tserof. "Wasn't me!", he insists. Fish? Nope. Fish is pretty far ahead. We finally decide it's Ash, who I sleep next to nightly and can testify can fart with the best of us. Not her either. We walk on and notice the smell walks with us. Finally, Fish identifies it. "Sulpher", he tells us. Apparently, the entire area had farted. Not overpowering, but not pleasant either. We decide to quickly grab the cache and move on to less smelly areas.

The cache was in a pile of rocks. The clue was "near the dark rock." Problem is, there were LOTS of dark rocks. So we, in typical ZB fashion, decided the solution was to look under all of them. Sure enough, this worked (after about 10 minutes) and Tserof located the cache. Admittedly, the rock it was under was considerably darker than most of the ones around it, but still. It was kind of like finding a needle in a crack house. Lots of needles, but if you need a specific one, not so good. But we found it, and that's all that matters.

Next up is one called Water's Edge. Honestly, I can't remember much about this one. Ash and I have been sitting here talking about it for several minute but neither of us remembers much so nothing terribly funny must have happened. Also, it's premium only so I can't look at it to jog my memory (although Ash can and it didn't help). I'm getting too old for this. Maybe I should take a notebook to sketch down notes during the hunt. Anyway, we found it. The only thing I remember was that it had a set of suspenders in it which we almost took to give to a friend who has a persistent problem with showing far more of his butt than any of us wants to see (and he isn't even a plumber) but didn't because we didn't have anything to leave and I've already been lectured once this week about taking swag and not leaving items of "equal or greater value." More on that later. The only other thing of note that happened here was that Fish nearly backed over a sign which read something to the effect of "We have provided this nature area for your enjoyment. If you litter, we'll take the right away from you." That's not exactly right but it's close. We had fun with it because it was written in that no-nonsense military style that seemed to insist that you WILL have a good time and promising dire consequences if you don't. Mad Mike and I made numerous jokes about being sent to Guantanamo for frowning in the nature area.

Ok, it's almost 8 and Deadwood is about to come on so consider this part 1 of a two part episode while I go watch Deadwood. I'll post the second half of our adventure later tonight or tomorrow.

Until then, happy caching!

Custom Geocoins

2006-07-15T06:52:00.000-07:00

That's the beginning of an image we plan to use for our Zen Bassmasters Custom Geocoin. We've been looking at prices online and, so far, it's been pretty darn expensive, not to mention the fact that we'd then have 100 geocoins.

So my questions, gentle readers, are these.

1. Does anyone recommend any specific companies for custom geocoins. We're looking for good value, good workmanship, and trackability through geocaching.com

2. Do you recommend any certain type of geocoin over another?

3. If we tried to sell some of our extras, what is the market like for custom coins? What's the general going rate for them and what sites are out there to either sell them through or find out information about selling them?

Every Cache Has Its Thorns- 7/8/06

2006-07-11T18:04:00.000-07:00

Sorry to everyone for the delay in posting new material. We didn't cache last week because several of us went to a Trailer Park Troubadours concert. Tserof didn't go so the GPS didn't go so we didn't get to cache around Nashville. We did cache this past Saturday but I came down with a nasty cold and had to stay home from work on Monday. I could have blogged but blogging and Nyquil don't really mix. It says so on the bottle.

**Cheap Plug**
If you get a chance to see the Trailer Park Troubadours in your area, go see them. Excellent music, good stage show, and a bunch of great guys. Go see them.

But read my blog first.

Anyway, on this day, we had a beer run to make, having to pick up a bunch of microbrews from the folks at Middle Ages Brewing Company in Syracuse. Ash's mom had just gone up there and, since we'd gotten addicted to the beer when a friend came down earlier in the year and, since you can't get Syracuse microbrews in Tennessee, we sent her with a list. Ash's mom was in Smyrna so we sent Fish off to geocaching.com to scout caches in the Smyrna area.

At this point, I should explain Fish to you. Most caching groups probably have one person like Fish. Fish is our obsessive/compulsive geocacher, often planning out caching trips two, three, four weeks in advance. He's a good guy to have around as we don't have to do any of the work, just show up where he tells us and cache.

This week, Fish finds a group of caches on a trail at Percy Priest lake. He e-mails us with his list all mapped out and gleefully tells us that it's a 5 mile round trip hike and there's two caches that are 3 terrain. We all take a minute to see if it sinks in for him...

It didn't.

Finally, I e-mail him and nicely (because Fish gets very defensive about his cache planning and because he's married to my cousin, who I'm afraid of) try to explain the physics of a bunch of fat people, only one of whom has ever managed to walk 5 miles straight at the gym on the flat, air conditioned track, trying to trek through 5 miles of woods, navigating terrain 3, the mention of which still gives Tserof flashbacks of Frodo and sometimes causes him to lie down in the fetal position mumbling "make the bad hobbit go away..."

Finally, Fish sees the error of his ways (or at least doesn't relish having to carry us) and re-makes his cache list to give us only a 2 mile round trip and a couple of terrain 3 caches. We gave Tserof his medicine to stop the shakes and made plans.

The group this week consisted of me, Ash, Mad Mike, Fish, Tserof, and Jalera. The soundtrack for this week was Todd Snider's "Near Truths and Hotel Rooms" and Jason Ringenberg's "Empire Builders."

We arrived at Percy Priest lake and our first cache, "Welcome to East Fork Recreation Area", was right at the entrance. This would have been good except there was no place to pull off and no place to park so I ended up sitting in the middle of the road, watching for cops or park security, while Fish and Mad Mike grabbed the cache and signed the book. We didn't linger long enough to read the log or peruse the toys as I was seriously paranoid about just standing in the middle of the road. Easy find but not a great hide, in my opinion. It just begs for muggle trouble. Nevertheless, it's a find and we were off to a good start.

We park near the loading ramp at the lake and take off down the trail. Our next cache was "Geocache Protection Program" and was hidden by our good friend Monkeybrad. The clue was "near the stump by the half-double helix." "Isn't that a single helix?", Tserof asks. Probably so, but Monkeybrad's my bud and I trust him. Unfortunately, we had some trouble finding a stump and everyone was everywhere. No stump was left unturned (except by Ash, whose fear of snakes had gripped her again) and we almost gave up. Finally Tserof, the closest thing to a science major we have in the group, locates a likely "single-helix" and Fish quickly locates the cache. No stump though. I don't know if there was a stump that is no more or if the stump was a figment of Monkeybrad's imagination but either way, it's another find and we're two for two for the day.

Next up is "Rainy Day Cache", hidden by JoeGPS. Unfortunately, for some reason, Joe decided to make this cache viewable by premium members only so I can't give you any more of the details, since Tserof has the premium account. We travelled along the path and ran into what Fish told us was a nest of some sort. "A nest? Like a hornet nest?", I asked, showing off my great fear of small stinging insects. "No," Fish replied. "Larger." Larger? What the hell larger lives in Percy Priest lake? We soon decided it was badgers. Large, scary badgers.

I should mention here that our group of friends has a long-running joke involving anything related to badgers. I'm not even sure if it started because Ash and Jalera both had D&D characters slaughtered by badgers once or if we just thought the name was funny. Badger... It is kinda humorous...

Anyway, Fish didn't want to disturb whatever kind of badgers or large bunnies with big nasty teeth were in the nests so we backtracked. "I think we can go right up the trail and double back to it easily." Famous last words. You'd think we'd learn.

We doubled back and, despite our best efforts, couldn't find an easy way to the cache. Finally, we decided that the best way was the Zen Bassmaster way, which involves running headlong into the woods, crashing into trees, destroying vines, and smashing through enough thorns so we look like a participant in the Japanese King of the Deathmatch wrestling tournament on the other side.

Sure enough, this got us there. Good cache and a good hide, right next to an old fence. Sure enough, there was a little bitty umbrella, hence the name. There was also a Space Shuttle Columbia coin that I took and replaced with one of Ash's seemingly endless supply of Disney Character pencils. Another find for us! Maybe we'll actually go perfect today!

Then came Notorious. Again, this one is available to premiums only so no information other than to give a big "toss off" shout to JoGPS, the worst thing since Frodo who, despite being a bastard, at least lets poor people look at his caches.

The clue for this cache (which I can't access) gave us the idea that the cache was around a big fallen tree we found near the coordinates. Something about being covered with bark and that we might be sitting on it. Something like that. Again, the Nyquil makes it all fuzzy.

Anyhow, we beat on the big hollow fallen tree to scare off snakes. We looked around the tree, poked Fish's handy maglite inside the tree, no dice. We looked around the pile of bark beside the tree. Nothing. We looked up in the trees. Nothing. Ash kept insisting we "roll" the giant log so she could look under it. Not being interested in a hernia and remembering Ash's previous attempts to murder me on the trail, I declined and we decided to give this one a skip. If it's under the log, it can stay there. Otherwise, this one may have been moved.

The next one was called "In DA WOOD, Original", which is useful since there are about 5 caches named some variation of "In the woods" because, ya know, they're in the woods. A little creativity here folks. Another JoGPS so another I can't tell you about. We were walking around trying to home in on this one (the GPS had decided the cover was too much for it) when I decided I needed to take a leak. I found a likely tree and began to take care of business as Fish walked into a clearing to get a better read. As I was finishing up my "commune with nature" , I hear Fish exclaim behind me, "oh shit. I think Gryph's pissing on the cache!"

Sure enough, the GPS was pointing right to the spot where I was shaking off. We begin to cautiously cast about for the cache and, fortunately for us, the actual cache was hidden on the other side of the tree from my puddle of pee. Anyone can find a cache and sign a log. Finding a cache and marking it with your scent though... That's hardcore!

Next up is Walk in Da Woods. Another JoGPS so another string of expletives that I'm trying not to say here because I have a teacher who reads this and is talking about using it for some of her classes when they talk about latitude and longitude so, much like Calamity Jane in Deadwood, I'm fining myself by the curse. Kids, don't swear like I do. I'm a bad, bad man.

I don't actually remember much about this one, besides the fact that we found it. Since I can't look at the clue (or even log it as a find), I can't jog my memory. I remember we found it and I remember doing quite a bit of walking in da woods, but not much else. Sorry. Again, Nyquil... (kids, don't take Nyquil, it's bad, m'kay?)

Walking along the trail to the next cache, Jalera somehow manages to whack herself in the knee with her own walking stick. I'm not sure how this is possible, but she managed it. I suggested that perhaps she was rehearsing her new one woman play, called "The Nancy Kerrigan Story."

Bamboo Forest is next. Good hide even if it was by JoGPS, who is quickly surpassing Frodo on my hate list. It definitely lived up to its name as there was a ton of bamboo between us and the cache. Good hiding place too. I won't give it away other than to say it was certainly "locked" in place. We found a neckstrap that looked like it fit Tserof's GPS and took it, leaving yet another of Ash's pencils behind. If you like Disney crap, you should really hit these caches.

Our next cache was "Walk in the Woods". By now, Tserof, having the least stamina of our daily walking group, was starting to get tired and Jalera, who doesn't walk at all if she can help it, had taken to not leaving the trail anytime we did caches. So we decided this would be our last cache and we'd head for the car after (Fish, unlike my lovely wife, actually kept a track to the car on all along. Good man).

Unfortunately, I don't need to look at the website to jog my memory on this one. It was 300 ft of pure hell in the form of briar bushes. Fish, in the lead and wearing shorts, got the worst of it, but we all got our share. After 300 feet of climbing, the GPS pointed to yet another tangle of brambles. At this point even Fish, our insane cacher with the 5 mile hike, was ready to give this up. And for good reason. He looked like he'd had his legs shaved by OJ Simpson. I had a thorn shoved half an inch into my finger that I was trying to pry out (which still hurts like, er, heck too when I type. I bleed for you, gentle readers), Mad Mike and Ashlynne's hands both looked about as bad as mine, and Tserof looked like the Living Dead.

Back through the brambles we went, encountering yet another group of cuts, scrapes, and thorns. Ow.

Finally back to the car, to head for the house and enjoy some of the good beer we bought (kids, remember not to drink before 21!). First though, someone had dropped off a geocoin from Britain in our Wabbit Season cache so we headed over to it to look at it. Cool coin and it got taken that very night so we just got to see it (and just missed the people who picked it up, apparently).

That's all for this week. Next week, we head toward Winchester after a day long yard sale for Ash and I, who seriously need to get rid of some crap. Anyone need a daybed or a non-functional computer? If so, come see us.

Tap That Cache- June 24, 2006

2006-06-26T17:56:00.000-07:00

Yep, we're back with another week of caching. I'm sure some of you have probably begun to question our sanity, coming back each week after barely surviving mountains, mudsinks, and Frodo (the bastard). But we've never really been a bright lot so on we press. Hopefully it at least gets you a couple of chuckles along the way.

This week we're back to what seems to be settling in as our usual crew. Me (Gryphon), Ashlynne, Tserof, Mad Mike, and Fish. Today we decide to hit some caches in the Marshall County area as well as show Mad Mike the location of the Zen Bassmasters cache since he wasn't with us last week when we placed it.

Our musical accompaniment for the day is Sevendust's "Southside Doublewide Acoustic Live" cd that I just downloaded off E-music. Great stuff.

The first cache we headed to was "Welcome to Bethlehem", which is on the way to Chapel Hill. It was listed as a difficulty 3, terrain 1.5 so we were expecting a bit of a challenge. The coordinates led us right to an old cemetary. Yay! The Zen Bassmasters love cemetary caches. I don't know if that means we're morbid, satanic, or just history lovers. I guess it's all the same thing to the right group of people.

We walked into the cemetary and looked around a bit. It was a pretty old cemetary with a lot of gravestones from the early 20th century. Heading back to the cache we ran across a couple of gravestones together that were tiny little stones for a couple of stillborn babies. They were dated in the 1920's. It was a tough time and that was definitely a sobering reminder of it. If you have a kid, go give him a hug and be thankful that modern medicine has advanced.

Anyway, the cache was just where we thought it should be. We've come to expect that from the originator, Scoot the Frog who, along with partner Monkeybrad, has become our favorite cacher. That said, we're now wondering about the difficulty 3 since we found it right off. Maybe we're just getting better. In the cache we found a fishing bobber, the perfect prize for a Zen Bassmaster and now destined for our cache, Wabbit Season.

The second cache of the day is called "Chapel Hill City Park." Having grown up in Unionville, which is right down the road from Chapel Hill, I wasn't aware Chapel Hill had a park. It's mostly farm land. What the hell do they need a park for?

The coordinates led us right into the middle of downtown Chapel Hill (as opposed to "uptown Chapel Hill", which is on the other side of the red light). That can't be right. The title says it's a park but the coordinates sent us right to a building with another building beside it. We re-check the coordinates. Yep. It's supposed to be right here. We drive a circle around the buildings, thinking maybe the park entrance is behind it. Nope. Just an alley. We drive back around to the front, thinking maybe this place used to be a park and we'd find something marking it. As we drove back around, Fish spotted a sign that he thought said "park" on it. Ah-ha! we thought. Must have been a park before this area grew up and the cache is near a historical marker. We parked uptown and took the 30 ft walk to downtown to investigate the sign. We walk up and find... a park. Of sorts. The Chapel Hill City Park consists of a paved area about the size of a cubicle, one tree, and two picnic tables. We found the cache in short order (easy to do when you're searching an area roughly the size of my bathroom) and discovered it had no log. Who the hell steals the log out of a cache? Weird. We added some paper for a new log and moved on, commenting on Chapel Hill's "Park". Of course, those two picnic tables could hold about half the city of Chapel Hill, so maybe it's appropriately sized. "I wonder if they book it for weddings?" Mad Mike asked. "They could.", I interjected. "With Chapel Hill weddings the whole bride's family/groom's family kind of overlap so it cuts down on the people to invite." I know. Not nice. But growing up in Unionville, it was the one place that even we could look down on...

Next stop was Henry Horton State Park for a duo of caches on one of the walking trails. The first was called Dendrology 101. Tserof read the clue, which was "Behind the Quercus Coccinea". Hilarity ensued. Jokes galore abounded about what sounded for all the world like Latin Porn. We kept having Tserof, whose sexuality we question daily for reasons I'll get into later, read the clue and giggled like a bunch of little boys who just discovered their dad's Playboy. All except Ashlynne, who has apparently matured past puberty and didn't see the true humour in "Quercus Coccinea".

Once the giggles subsided, we dispatched Tserof to go look up Quercus Coccinea on his cell phone's net access. Turns out it's a Red Oak tree. Go figure. I liked the other things we speculated it was better. Anyway, Tserof was impressed that he got to look up something on his phone (we're geeks remember) so we didn't have the heart to tell him that we'd already found a plaque that told us just that. We poked around for a bit and found the cache, a micro. I'm not huge on micros but it was cool spot so it's all good.

Next up was High Point of the Trail, which was a bit of a hike down the trail. We enjoyed the hike and saw some nice natural formations to comment on, including a HUGE flat rock that was big enough that we thought it was a parking area from a distance. We walked to the coordinates and cast about for the cache. No luck. Just then Fish noticed something that didn't look quite right. He investigated and, sure enough, there was the cache. I'm being intentionally vague with that description because it was undoubtedly the coolest hide we've seen yet and I don't want to spoil it for anyone. Congratulations JoGPS. We plan to steal your idea for a future hide. We signed the log and took a prism. We then discovered that we didn't have anything to leave. Fish took off his backpack and produced a letter H from inside. "The son gives me stuff to take to work with me sometimes" he said as we all stared.

By this time, Tserof had somehow decided that his new favorite word was Dendrology and was yammering constantly about his expertise with plants. We took to calling him Dr. Dendrology because of it (when we weren't calling him jackass). All the way back to the car, Tserof became the Bubba Gump of trees. Popcorn trees, fried trees, boiled trees, broiled trees, you can sautee it, deep fry it, etc. Finally Fish had apparently had enough because from ahead of us on the trail we hear Tserof yell "Ow! Fish, stop tapping my ass!"

Hilarity ensued. I mean hilarity. If you think the Quercus Coccinea brought out the snickering children in us, it was nothing compared to Tserof accusing Fish of "tapping his ass."

As I mentioned before, we openly question Tserof's sexuality often. This comes from his penchant for playing female characters in roleplaying games. I don't just mean playing a character who happens to be female. I mean PLAYING females. Dressing up in pretty clothes, flirting with guys, he even played a stripper in Star Wars Galaxies. Honestly, he's scary sometimes.

Anyway, much hilarity came from discussion of Fish tapping Tserof's ass, at least until we had to do an emergency intervention to keep Mad Mike from poking a hole in his brain by ramming the sharpened end of a stick into his ears. Apparently the mental images of Tserof's ample ass being tapped was just a little too much for him to handle.

At this point I should tell you that our little group has become adept at emergency mental image diversion. This is due to Tserof's habit of telling anyone who will listen, in excruciating detail, about his sexual exploits when drunk. Did I mention excruciating? You have no idea...

So after helping Mad Mike by helping him divert to "nice" mental images such as Jessica Alba, we moved on down the trail and back to the car.

The next cache was called "Forgotten One" and was another easy one. Little cache in a cemetary. Did I mention we like cemetary finds? We like cemetary finds. Nothing really to report on this one as it was a quick park and grab. Just suffice it to say that the jokes about Tserof's tapped ass continued throughout the grab.

Next up was "Cheap Cheap Cheap" which was supposed to be hidden near a business that apparently used that slogan in the past. The coordinates led us right to the courthouse square, about 100 yards from a place I used to work. While the man who runs the business is indeed "Cheap cheap cheap", the clue said nothing about "incompetent" or "ancient" so I was pretty sure that wasn't it. We poked around the courthouse for a bit, saw the war dead memorial, and found nothing. Just then Fish re-checks the coordinates and finds he's off. Way way off. Like half a mile off. I don't know what he was tracking, as there was no cache here, but he was. I think he just wanted to make me get near my old workplace and bring up bad memories. We all got back into the car and sure enough, it led us right to it. Once I saw the sign, a memory of my childhood sprung up and I knew it was right. I can remember the owner of the store on my television as a child screaming "CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!" during his commercials. We found the cache easily and discovered a nice surprise. A travel bug! Not just a travel bug, but a fishing themed travel bug! How cool is that for the Zen Bassmasters? We took it, to move it over to our cache.

Our final cache is Berlin Spring. We drive out near Lewisburg's airport and find a neat little picnic area with a cave. Very cool spot. Even cooler still was that we found a plaque near a large flat rock that said all three of Tennessee's presidents, Jackson, Johnson, and Polk, had used this rock to make speeches. We're suckers for history and this was it. Fish stood on the rock and made a speech. We all agreed that we hated his political stance and promised to vote against him.

The cache was listed as a terrain 3 and it lived up to it. We walked up a hill, got eaten alive by thorn bushes, and became a walking buffet for the entire area's ticks, but we found the cache without anyone getting hurt, a first for our group.

We took pictures around the area and agreed that this was the coolest site today. Beautiful area.

It was getting late at this point and had been raining off and on all day so we decided if we were going to get a good picture for the travel bug (it requested pictures of cachers fishing) we needed to get back. We headed back to Fish's house to get a pole and head on over to our cache.

We'd had a complaint from one guy on geocaching.com that the cache was too hard to find and covered by poison ivy so we sent Mad Mike, who didn't know the location. He cast about for a while and eventually found the cache. It's kind of a difficult step to get to it so we sent Mike in to see if he could get to it, figuring if a 400lb guy could get it, it couldn't be too hard. He got it out but had a difficult time and suggested we move the cache to a 3. Done.

We placed the toys from today and the travel bug in our cache and went to drop Fish off, feeling quite accomplished at batting .1000 today (not to mention wet from the rain.)

All in all, a good day. I'll go back to the Berlin Spring site again just for the area so discovering that was worth the entire day. No injuries, no getting lost, no mountains. Probably a boring read but a nice day. If you like juvenile sexual innuendo or historical sites, today was your day. Otherwise, maybe next time. Stay tuned.

Cacher's Paradise- June 17, 2006

2006-06-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

Another week, another geocaching trip. This week, Mad Mike was out of town at a family reunion so we decided to hit the Shelbyville area to pick up our friend Fish for to do some caches over there.

Fish lives near the park in Shelbyville so we decided to hit a cache we found in the area called Celebration Station. The GPS led us into the nature trail and we began to cast about for the cache. Unfortunately, Tserof's GPS unit picked that time to become possessed by Satan. We walked to where the GPS pointed... and it pointed in the other direction. We walked there... It pointed somewhere else. After half an hour or so of walking around the park in circles, following a GPS unit that was determined to point us anywhere but where the cache was, we gave up.

Geocaches 1, Geocachers 0, GPS Unit 666

On the way to our next cache, Tserof decides to try the geek equivalent of an exorcism and reboots the GPS unit. It must have worked because it performed admirably the rest of the day. Good thing it's waterproof. That holy water is murder on machinery.

Our next cache is the one I'm most looking forward to today, Horse Mountain. It's on the grounds of WHAL, the little AM radio station I worked at for three years in the early 90's. Boy has it grown up. The trailer that served as our studio has long since been pulled out and the parking lot has become a tangle of weeds. The clue to the cache mentioned the old satellite dish that I remember being outside. At first we couldn't find it. But soon we discovered that the dish was still there, it has just lost its battle with the weeds. Sure enough, right where the GPS said it would be, we found the cache. Neat cache. Lots of nice goodies. We took out a couple of things and put in our usual "Instant RPG Kit". But for this cache, I had something special. During my time at the radio station, I rose to the "meteoric" heights of News Director, which came with a giant raise (all the way to $4.55 an hour) and also a box of business cards. When I left the radio station, I took one card with me. I figured since this cache was set up to remember the station, I'd give my last card to the cache. I even signed it for the two people who might be interested in my career (unfortunately, I'm pretty sure my grandma can't get to the cache and my wife was already there so really, it's none). I shared a couple of memories of the station with the group, signed the logbook and bid my old home goodbye, probably for the last time. If you go do the cache, you'll probably see my card there (I can't imagine anyone will take it). If you do and you remember the old station, drop me a message here. I'm like Bruce Springsteen. I love to remember those Glory Days.

Geocaches 1, Geocachers 1

Next up, we headed to another cache nearby. It was a microcache but it was an easy find up near Economy Pencil factory. The cache was called, appropriately, Forget Your Pencil. I'm not a huge fan of micro caches. Too hard to find and no chance to browse the interesting collection of goodies that populate regular caches. But this one was right there so we logged it. Anything to get our averages up.

Geocaches 1, Geocachers 2

Next up, we saw a cache on the way to Tullahoma called "Big Duck." The description said it was on private property but promised the owner gave permission for geocachers to come on the property to look. We arrived at the coordinates, only to be greeted with a locked gate and a big sign promising that trespassers will be prosecuted. We had some trouble reconciling the sign with the promise of the cache owner that we had permission to scout the location. Deciding that, since in Tennessee "prosecuted" usually means "shot", that we'd avoid the law and possibly the morgue and give this one a miss. Tserof kept pointing out that the listing said we had permission but we thought it would probably be little consolation if they felt bad when they found the GPS on our corpses, we moved on.

Geocaches 2, Geocachers 2

Well, this is turning out to be a close match today. Let's see what the rest of the day brings. We moved on to the next thing down the line, a cache called Cemitree. It promised a terrain rating of 2. We knew from the description it was in a cemetary and we wondered how the hell a cemetary could have a 2 terrain. Not to worry. The cache owner, a person named Scoot the Frog, is apparently the Anti-Frodo. Instead of downplaying the hellish terrain leading to his cache, Scoot was overly conservative. We drove into the cemetary, drove down the nice gravel road, within 20 feet of the cache. A quick search (and by quick I mean 5 seconds) and we had it. I won't give away the exact location of the cache, but I will say what they did with it was pretty neat and we're planning to steal it for one of our own caches (the idea, not the cache itself).

Geocaches 2, Geocachers 3

Next up was a cache over Tullahoma way. It was called Ovoca Lake. I have lived in the Shelbyville area all my life and have been to Tullahoma countless times and I had no idea there was a lake here. Strange how that happens and it's the thing I love most about geocaching. You go to a place so many times and your routine gets so ingrained that you miss what's right in front of you. Twice now geocaching has pulled me back and made me re-examine my surroundings. First last week when I, somehow, missed an entire mountain despite being in Huntsville hundreds of times, and today with Ovoca Lake.

Anyway, we drove to Ovoca Lake and I discovered why I'd never heard of it before. Ovoca Lake is a lake like Monte Santo is a mountain. It's really more like the Barry Bonds of ponds (Barry Ponds?) than a real lake. But we weren't there for the fishing, we were there for the caching and the description promised a cache about 20 feet from the parking area. Needing a good Park and Grab to up our score, we dove in. And walked. And walked. Around. Over a creek. Around and around. Back over the creek and finally, we found the cache... About 20 feet from the car. Turns out we'd walked in at path #1 and the cache was on path #2. Silly us. Once again the cache was across the creek. Ash and Fish nimbly stepped over as Tserof and I, the modern day equivalent of The Fat Boys, looked for a way across. Ash pointed us to a spot and insisted loudly that was where we'd crossed before. Tserof and I both looked at it and agreed that it wasn't. Ash continued to insist as only a New Yorker can, that we'd both forgotten and that absolutely WAS the place we'd crossed previously. We still doubted but decided it was as good a place to cross as any so I stepped onto a spot to prepare to hop over. Problem is, the "spot" was really a huge sink of mud and I sunk to the top of my ankle. My ankle, having suffered a stress fracture last November and only recently having let me forget it, protested the ill treatment and rolled on me. Ow.

At this point, I've decided that, between the events on Monte Santo chronicled here last week and this today, that Ash was trying to bump me off for the life insurance money. As I pulled my foot free and limped to a different, more stable, spot, I made Tserof promise that if I died out here under suspicious circumstances, he'd tip off the CSI folks to my theory.

Tserof and I finally made it across the creek, Tserof no worse for the wear and me quite a bit worse for the wear. We took a little plastic cube (not sure what it was for but Fish fancied it) and added our requisite Instant RPG kit to the paintball tube and replaced it.

Geocaches 2, Geocachers 4, Ankle OWWWW

Next up was one in the middle of Tullahoma called Rolling Stock Report. This was another from our good friend and conservative terrain estimator, Scoot the Frog (as opposed to our enemy and sneaky bastard terrain estimator Frodo). We went to the coordinates and found an old Caboose that had been restored and put on display. Kind of neat and the informative sign gave a lot of information on the history of rail travel in Tullahoma and the uses of the caboose. Neat little history lesson. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the cache. It was a micro and just plain evaded us. We knew it was there as it had been found recently, but we just couldn't get our hands on it. Finally, we decided that, since micros don't contain goodies anyway, and since we were all quite happy with the caboose, that we'd just treat it as a virtual cache, log it as a success, and move on. Cheating? Maybe. But we're just rebels like that. We're being fitted for our matching leather jackets and greasing up our James Dean haircuts right now.

Geocaches 2, Geocachers 5, Ankle: Does anyone have an aspirin?

Next up was a real virtual cache called On Star. It is on the grounds of the AEDC Air Force Base and tells the story of the different camps that were housed there over the years. My grandmother used to work at the first one, Camp Forrest, during World War II and told me stories about it as a child so it was neat to see the area. Ash wrote down all the things to answer the questions for this one (Tserof, who never met a book he didn't like the movie adaptation of, was distraught that our geocaching trip had given him homework) and we moved on.

Geocaches 2, Geocachers 6

The next was also on the AEDC base, called Watchtower. A good name for it too as it was right by an old watchtower on the base (which is good since my other thought was that it was a cache placed by Jehovah's Witnesses). The clue for it was "log your visit" and Tserof complained about the useless clue. I wasn't so sure as the wording seemed too precise to not have hidden meaning. Sure enough, we soon found the cache inside an old hollow log covered by some leaves. Good big cache too. Lots of goodies including a fishing lure which, being Zen Bassmasters, we promptly took to add to our own cache we planned to plant, leaving a D20 and a samurai mini behind as payment. So far, this was my favorite cache of the day. Challenging, but not insanely so. Well-hidden, but not inside a freakin' cave on the side of a mountain, and a good big cache with fishing gear in it. Not to mention a bitchin' cool huge ass watchtower to look at as well. Bravo to the person who placed this one. Nice job.

Geocaches 2, Geocachers 7

Hey, looks like we're getting the hang of this geocaching thing. Got a hell of a lot of them done too. We decided to do one more before going home to pack up our own cache and place it. It was called Gone Fishin' and we decided that we couldn't very well be a team called the Zen Bassmasters if we hadn't done Gone Fishin'. We went to the location, Fisherman's Park in Shelbyville, made a few jokes about the giant sign for the guy running for Mayor who has the same name as Fish, tried to get Fish to stand in front of the "Fish for Mayor" sign for a picture, but he didn't seem interested in beginning his political career.

The cache was a pretty easy find, a small tupperware container among some rocks. We laughed as the notebook told of it being a replacement cache as the original had been washed away by the floods a couple of years ago. Tserof commented that it must have been a hell of a flood to get that high and Fish and I, having both seen it first hand, agreed it was quite a rise. Small cache but a nice one. Took a rubber fishing worm from the cache and, discovering we were out of treasures of our own, dropped in a quarter from my pocket. If you locate the cache, enjoy the jawbreaker my quarter bought you or call your mama. She misses you.

Geocaches 2, Geocachers 8

Woohoo! We kicked ass today. Got a lot accomplished, saw some cool spots, overcame a demonic GPS unit, and managed to almost re-break my ankle...

Ok, that last bit kind of sucked but the rest was good. We vowed to redo these caches in a couple of months both to take Mad Mike to see the good ones, and to see who all else had visited them. All in all a good day (he says as he downs a couple of Naproxen and rubs his swollen ankle) and a lot of fun.

From there, we had just one thing left to do, place our very first Zen Bassmaster cache. We placed one of our ready-made D20 kits in the ammo box provided by Fish, added some of the toys we found in the other caches, attached the fishing lure to the "official" Zen Bassmaster notebook to log the visits and we were ready to go. Almost. First I, being the originator of the Zen Bassmasters name and creed, had to write down the Code of the Bassmaster on the front page of the notebook. What's the Code of the Bassmaster, you ask? It's the secret of Zen, attained through long years of fishing trips. What does the code say? You'll have to locate the cache for that one.

Here are the coordinates. 35°30.299N 086°26.933W

The cache is called Wabbit Season and should be up on geocaching.com soon enough. If you're in the Shelbyville area for any reason, give it a try. We'll check in periodically to read your comments and logs.

Until next week, may the bass be with you...

-Gryph

June 11,2006: Take It Easy

2006-06-12T17:57:00.000-07:00

Before I get into today's adventure, a note on the first one. Upon further investigation, we discovered that Frodo had his cache rated at a more honest 3.5 terrain. Tserof had downloaded the coordinates and difficulty to the "recommended parking area." Sorry about all the swear words, Frodo....

You're still a bastard though...

We hadn't planned to cache today because we were all still recovering from the events of the previous day. But our usual Sunday gaming session got cancelled at the last minute and we found ourselves with the usual caching team and one extra (Jalera) and nothing to do.

Now at this point, a smart group of people would have rented a movie, gone home to nap off the soreness of the previous day, or play a video game (which we eventually did, The Warriors, which is groovy beyond description). But if yesterday taught us anything, it's that we don't have two brain cells between us to rub together and Jalera is apparently similarly afflicted as she readily agreed to accompany us on yet another caching trip. "Did you read the log of yesterday?", I asked her. She replied that she had. "And you still want to go out with us?", I asked. She did. Not a bright girl...

We decided to do a bit more research and hit some caches that didn't involve mountains, falling down, climbing up, or snakes in any way (Ashlynne insisted on that last bit. Apparently that "watch out for snakes" joke yesterday has given her a phobia).

The first cache we decided to do was one of the ones that defeated us the day before, the cache near the library and dentist's office in Fayetteville. Sure enough, the wooded areas looked much less daunting in the daylight and we soon found a path in, guarded by only a few brambles easily brushed away.

We wandered into a trash-filled area. Apparently people from Alabama aren't the only ones who litter. Beer and coke bottles abounded, as well as what looked like pieces of a car. Mad Mike and I, being avid Sopranos watchers, began to speculate that we might find Big Pussy and Adrianna stashed somewhere in here.

Tserof dutifully led us to the area where the cache was supposed to be and we began to scout around. Mad Mike found a likely hiding place and began to poke around with a stick. "I think we've got one here", he said. Sure enough, he'd located our group's very first cache! Imagine that... A cache that can be accessed easily, is where the coordinates say it is, and doesn't require me to wear a hat with a little light on it to get to. Chew on that, Frodo, you bastard!

Ok, maybe I'm not as ready to forgive Frodo as I thought.

The cache was a nice one, a good big tupperware bowl with a ton of goodies in it. We signed the log book (which had seen a lot of hits from all over) and browsed the prizes. I selected a toy truck to take out (intending to place it in a different cache with a note to continue to do so. If it's a truck, it ought to travel) and we placed our "Instant Roleplaying Kit" inside.

Geocachers 1, Geocaches 0

And there was much rejoicing (yay)

Our second attempt looked to be an easy one too. It promised a "History of Fayetteville". It was a three-part cache with historical sites providing clues to the next waypoint. Since we all consider ourselves educated geeks and are always interested in a little history, we jumped at the chance to learn a little about where we live.

First stop on the agenda was the Fayetteville Museum, which was built where the old Borden's Milk plant used to be. We went to the coordinates listed and found a plaque none of us had ever paid any attention to before. We learned a little history about one of Fayetteville's historical industries and handed the clue, the date the Borden's factory opened, to Ash who is our group's Rain Man with the numbers. She soon mathed out the clue and we were off.

The next leg took us to the Stone Bridge park in Fayetteville where a cell door from the old jail stood. It was pretty neat to look at (again, we'd been here 1000 times and none of us had ever paid any attention to it) and once again we handed the clue to Ash who, with Raymond Babbit-esque efficiency, sussed out the last clue.

Off we went, anticipating another fun historical site and the location of the cache.

Tserof looks at the coordinates and says "that can't be right... That looks like the way to the old hospital."

The old hospital, for those not from the Fayetteville area, has been abandoned for several years since the new hospital was built. Its proximity to the projects (also known as "The Bottoms" to Lincoln Countians) and its large, unlit parking lot has made it the small-town equivalent of the Mall of America if the product you are looking for happens to be illegal and smokeable/injectable. It's a scary place to be at night and not a terribly pleasant place to be during the day.

"There's a cemetary near there," Mad Mike said. "I bet it's something in the cemetary."

We take off, now hopeful that our trek will take us to some ancient gravestone of a famous Fayettevillian that we probably didn't even know lived here. History is fun! Yay!

We drove to the cemetary. The GPS was not impressed. We moved past the cemetary. The GPS was not impressed. We reluctantly began to drive toward the scary abandoned hospital. The GPS begins to beep happily, alerting us that we're near our destination.

"I have a bad feeling about this..." was uttered on more than one occasion.

Fortunately for us, the cache wasn't actually IN the old hospital (as it probably would have been if Frodo had hidden it) but the GPS led us behind the hospital. "What kind of history could be back here?" we wondered.

And we wondered for good reason. Now surrounded by the old hospital on one side, a nursing home on another, and the bottoms as a backdrop, we find the area where the cache is supposed to be hidden...

We made some cursory efforts at locating the cache, but our hearts weren't really in it. We were getting some "through the window" stares from the nursing home and quickly came to the realization that poking around in the bushes with sticks, looking frantically for something, in an area known as a drug zone, might attract unwanted attention of the law enforcement variety...

We also were a bit concerned that we were probably more likely to find used needles than a cache.

Geocachers 1, Geocaches 1

Now someone please tell me who the hell hides a cache in an area full of drug dealers, drug needles, and muggles galore? Who the hell finishes off a historical quest by sending you to an ugly, non-historical, dangerous place?

On a brighter note, our friends are not any smarter than we are and the log of our previous day's exploits, enough to warn any sane person from ever travelling with us, has actually caused us to be inundated with requests to join the next expedition.

Kind of makes you wonder if there were a lot of people trying to tag along with the Donner Party.

Next week, our friend Fish joins us and, since he lives in Shelbyville, we're going to try some caches in the Bedford County area. Bedford's my old stomping grounds so I'm looking forward to it. I'm especially looking forward to one cache that's hidden on the grounds where the radio station I used to work at stood. It was placed by people who wanted to remember what used to be there and reading their comments brought back some good memories of my days in radio. I also happen to have exactly one of my old business cards from my days as news director there left and I'm intending to plant it in the cache to provide a little history.

Assuming we can find it. It stands at the foot of Horse Mountain and, given our team's luck with mountains, I'm not getting my hopes up...

More to come next weekend. Stay tuned.

June 10, 2006: How Hard Can It Be?

2006-06-10T18:46:00.000-07:00

It seemed like a good idea at the time... I'd been reading about this thing called geocaching and it looked simple and fun. Buy GPS, look up caches online, use GPS to locate coordinates, find hidden box, take treasure, leave treasure of your own, do another. Hunting for buried treasure with electronic toys. Any geek's dream. Easy right?

Unfortunately not... You see, our little group of geocachers has a common problem. We're fat. Really fat. Not just "I need to lose 20 pounds before class reunion" fat but more like "pulling small objects into orbit around you" fat. Three of our group goes 400 lbs and up. The other is my wife, our "skinny" person at over 200 lbs. We could stand to lose a couple...

And that's part of the plan. See, our geocaching group is also our daily walking group. We try to support each other in a diet and exercise plan and go walking every Monday through Friday. So far there's been over 300 lbs lost between the four of us and plenty left to do. We saw the geocaching thing as a chance to extend our exercise plan to go outdoors (every geek's fear) and have more fun than walking circles around the gym.

This is the first in what I hope will be a running log of many weekend geocaching trips for our group. Sometimes there'll be more of us, sometimes less. Speaking of which, let's meet the group.

Our group consisted of me (Gryphon), Tserof, Mad Mike, and Ash, my wife. We set out on June 10 full of excitement. A new toy! Look, it tells us how fast we're going! Oooh, I have 13 satellites! Wow! I can see the position of the sun!

We decided to hit caches down Huntsville, Alabama way since Ash and I needed to go there for groceries anyway. We noticed several in Hazel Green, just across the line but decided to skip these for today and save them for "short trip days" since we were going all the way into Huntsville anyway.

We noticed by far the highest concentration of caches was on Monte Santo mountain (they have mountains in Alabama?) so we trekked on up to grab a few. Beautiful country and I'd never been so it was already a worthwhile trip. We carried with us three baggies full of a D20, miniatures, and pre-made characters sheets for a fantasy role-playing game (did I mention we're geeks?) to put in the caches as "prizes" when we found them and removed the "prizes" already there.

First up, was a multi-cache that looked like it was pretty easy and right off the road. It was posted by a guy named Frodo (apparently geekdom runs strong among the geocachers) and was called Lord of the Bling: Return of the Bling. It was listed as Difficulty 1, Terrain 2. Not a problem, even for out of shape fat people. Besides, we reasoned, the gps pegged it as right off the road near a bridge. We sent Ash down to investigate since the bank was a little bit steeper than the 400 pounders felt comfortable doing.

Oooh, there it is!, we said. Nope. Beer bottle. Ooooh there! Nope. Coke can. Damn people in Alabama litter a lot. We looked all over. Under rocks, under logs, under leaves. We tried to get Ash convinced to look under the bridge but her lack of a flashlight and my ill-times "Watch out for snakes!" joke convinced her that she didn't want this cache as much as we thought. Geocaches 1, Geocachers 0.

No big deal. We'll just do part 2 of Frodo's quest. It's only 450 feet away, Jason tells us, looking at his handy GPS. And it's only Terrain 1, Difficulty 2. No problem...

So down we go. And I do mean down. Down steep terrain. Over rocks, under trees, once over and under a tree at the same time. It was steep. And I MEAN steep. Four fat people perched perilously on a tiny rock, balanced by a sapling... This may not turn out well, I thought. But we pressed on. As we got farther in, we began to feel that this 450 feet was a hell of a lot more in practice than it was in theory, what with winding around brambles, tripping over stones, etc. But we pressed on still. By now, we had begun jokingly cursing Frodo and his "Terrain 1" climb. "Fucking little hobbit!" we said. "Did you guys notice Frodo was always falling down in the movies?" Tserof asked. "How the hell did he ever get here?" But still we pressed. Partially because we'd come to far to quit and partially because gravity wanted us to go that way.

Down we go until the GPS beeps, telling us we were near our goal. It dutifully pointed us in the right direction... right into a cave. "I think it's in the cave", Mad Mike, Master of the Obvious, tells us. "Surely it's not IN the cave" we reasoned. Caving without the right equipment is dangerous. It must be AROUND the cave!

Around the cave we searched, poking and prodding our sticks into crannies and crevaces (all except Jason who had broken his on the way down and was left with a nub). No cache. We begin to suspect it's in the cave. "Surely it's just in the entrance though" we thought. We peer into the darkness... Nothing. "You know, we probably should have brought a flashlight with us for this" I say, officially becoming Mad Mike's sidekick "Kid Obvious".

This would become a recurring theme in our caching trip. "We should have brought..." Water, flashlights, water, band-aids, naproxen pills, water, our brains, water. We weren't terribly well prepared (my old Boy Scout leader would be ashamed), not knowing we were going spelunking today. Finally, we give up and agree to move to another cache. By now uttering Frodo's name is equal to spitting on Baby Jesus. There are many jokes about calling ourselves Sauron just so we can have a goal of killing Frodo (are you seeing the geek theme running here?).

Back up the trail we go. All those things we had a hard time climbing down were suddenly harder, since old man gravity was pushing against us. "Gravity. Always keeping the fat man down" Mike exclaims. I am pretty sure there's a T-shirt in that, but am too tired to ponder it right now. Up and Up we go, primarily because the only other avenue is down and down hurts. 400 ft sounds like so little when you walk 3 miles a day, but 400 ft vertical sucks, let me tell you. Up and out and back to the car, to partake of the 95 degree bottles of water in my cargo area. "Ice" we said, referencing yet another thing we need on a geocaching journey.

Geocaches 2, Geocachers 0

Next we drive up to the very top of Monte Santo, where Tserof's GPS tells us more prizes await. Ash wants a chance at the new toy and Tserof agrees to let her guide us to the next cache. My heart sinks. I love my wife more than life itself but I have ridden with her navigating enough times to know she is the worst, I mean worst, navigator in history. We have been to probably 10 concerts at 3rd and Lindsley since we started dating and probably as many more as friends before and it's always the same. We get near it, Ash swears she can get me there, I turn down a road that she say will get us there, we see our destination, we see the one-way street going the wrong way. We circle around. Wash, rinse, repeat 32 times...

This can't end well...

Sure enough, Ash takes us off down the lovely paved path merrily navigating. About halfway down she tells us "I like this one better. I'm switching to it!" and bounds off down the windy, sloping path, apparently intent on earning her Junior Pathfinder badge for the day. We all look at each other apprehensively and begin to follow. Fools we are. Silly people... Did I mention I love my wife? With every fiber of my being? It was a good thing because by the end of this trek, I was beginning to wonder aloud what the spousal abuse laws were like in Alabama...

The path meandered left. The path meandered right. We walked down and down for what seemed like hours. Every time we checked with Ash however, we were always approximately .2 miles from our cache. "We're not making any progress, something is not right here" Mad Mike said. He only has the one super power, but he's damn good at it.

Down and down and Mad Mike, who had apparently discovered a new power called "Voice of Reason" points out that it will be getting dark in an hour or so and we should probably give up and start moving out. Tserof wisely takes over the GPS navigating reins and begins to plot our course back to the car. "How are you doing that" Ash asks. Tserof tells her we started tracking when we left our van so the red line should lead back to it. "But I started a new track when I switched to this new cache!" Ash tells us. We all take a moment to ponder the fact that we now have no plot to our car and to ponder the penalties for aiding in spousal abuse in Alabama.

Geocaches 3, Geocachers 0

Up and up we climb. We are doing a lot of climbing but somehow don't seem to be getting any closer to the top. Not sure how that's possible. It probably isn't. I went into a bit of a Twilight Zone there from lack of water and a heart rate that is in the "red zone". Up and up and up. Farther and farther. Tserof and I, the least in shape of the four of us, begin to ponder how a team of EMTs will get down here to us when we have our heart attack and, more critically, how they plan to get two 400 lb men back out. We begin to suspect we're going to die on this mountain. I begin to ponder the embarassment of dying not on Mt. Everest or Mt. Kilamanjaro, but Monte Santo, which only qualifies as a mountain at all because it's in Alabama, where mountains are in short supply.

Mad Mike finally sees the top of a house and some power lines. We're almost out. Tserof chooses this time to begin hyperventilating, forcing me to become "Motivational Speaker of the Day" to encourage him to get up. This mostly consisted of pleading with him that, if he planned to die on me, please do it up there on the road where it would at least be easy to direct EMTs to his corpse. Surprisingly, this speech seemed to work on him as Tserof got the breathing under control and climbed to the top... right into a campsite nowhere near our car. We all groan. Ash, feeling at least slightly guilty at nearly murdering her husband and best friend offers to go get the car and come back for us.

We sit on logs and ponder the nature of women. Are there sane ones out there? We agree there probably are not.

Ash returns and we begin our journey down the mountain. I inform Ash that I am reporting her to the Junior Pathfinders and recommending that she does not get her badge.

On the way home, full finally of cold water and only slightly worse for the wear (are the spots supposed to be in front of your eyes half an hour later?) we decide we don't want to go home without seeing one cache, any cache. So we pick one of the Hazel Green ones that is near a baseball field. "Baseball fields are flat" we tell ourselves. This one should be easy.

I'm discovering that easy isn't a word for us... The GPS dutifully leads us past the baseball field, past the trees beside the baseball field, and right into the impassable tangle of brambles beside a creek. "The GPS says it's in there" Tserof tells us. "I think it's on the other side of the creek." We decide that the two members of the team wearing shorts would not appreciate the impassable brambles and move on.

Geocaches 4, Geocachers 0

Finally, in Fayetteville proper, we decide to hit the one in the middle of town, right by the library. How much more of a Park and Grab can you get than a library? Trusty GPS leads us past the library, past the dentist, and right into another patch of brambles... This one's not impassable but it's not easy either. Tser and Ash once again reference their shorts and decide this maybe isn't a good idea. We also once again remember we have no flashlight and it's getting dark.

Final Score:
Geocaches 5, Geocachers 0

Yikes... We play like the Milwaukee Brewers there... Oh well. We make a plan to scout out some more, easier, caches next weekend and go home, tired, smelly, and aching. Mad Mike mentions we've probably had a week's worth of workout today and the sweat on all our shirts says we probably did. We all agree that we'd better do well in our weigh-in on Monday...

So that's it folks. Our first Adventure in Geocaching. Check here every week or two and I'll try to keep up with posting. Hopefully they won't all be as eventful as this one (or as non-productive) but if nothing else, there's entertainment value in four overweight people attempting an athletic hobby. Kind of like a train wreck...

Until next time...

-Gryph