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Birthday (B)Ash
Another fun trip with the catsnfish clan!
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to mohjoe, we’ve an Earthcache for you!
We broke the news to mohjoe on Friday night when I picked up my sons for our weekend. I had him read a draft of “Going for the Gold” and when he got to the last paragraph he said “Thanks Dad!” We had dinner, cake and ice cream sandwiches and began telling them our plans. Typical teenager, he answered “Cool” between bites of cake.
His brothers, the puppies, were keen on it as well, especially when we told them we’d be going to see full “dinosaur” skeletons right where they were being dug up. My youngest, Josh, began jabbering about T Rex and Transformers (he is always talking about Transformers) and I told him whoa... he might see an Etrex, but no T-Rex and that he had better calm down or he would be sitting in the van while everyone else got to look at old bones. Typical parent statement, my Mom must have said those very words to me at least a hundred times, but the kids nowadays know that we would/could never do that. Still, he calmed down a little.
I was showing mohjoe how to get and load the caches. I pointed to the computer screen and told him to say those words. “caches along a route”... nope, no big voice. Must just be me. He runs the queries and loads the 2 Etrex and 3 Legends we’ll be using tomorrow (when we all do the bee dance it is really comic choreography!) and the Palm. Then it’s off to bed, so we can get an early morning start.
“Rise and shine, RISE AND SHINE, git dressed and grab ya pillaws, RISE AND SHINE” Did that sound like a drill sergeant to you? If it did then you may have a better idea of what I actually said. The boys have a hearty Pop Tart breakfast washed down with O.J. and they stumble out to the van. I think that Jens, the middle puppy, managed all that without ever being fully conscious. Vic and I had already been up an hour and had everything loaded, eaten our oatmeal breakfasts (still dieting), made our game plan, (that was easy, find five on the way, then go to the Earthcache) and... tried to raid a neighbors bird feeder for bird seed?
We had run our.. what mohjoe said... just between Norfolk
We pulled into a gas station and I was informed by Vic that I’ll be driving since she is feeling sleepy. Ok, no problem. When we take a trip I get to be the info system and navigator, with the laptop on my lap, bouncing between Streets & Trips and GSAK, the Palm on top of the computer and the S&T GPS suctioned to the window, my Legend on the dashboard. Vic has her suction mount for her Legend on the driver’s window.
Getting in the drivers seat I remove her mount, adjust the seat and mirrors and wait for her return. She gets in and a half mile down the road she starts shutting everything down saying we don’t need this yet. The truth is she wanted a nap and all this stuff I always have on my lap just wasn’t comfortable. Really? I didn’t know that!
Oh well, she didn’t nap, and I was back in the passenger seat and rebooting before we got to Norfolk.
The first cache of the day was a “Hides of March” cache. This series of collaborative caches were placed by several Nebraska
On to the next cache, which was a troll, grabbed it, tagged it #496 and moved on. #497... mohjoe walks up and plucks it right away, after I had been elbow deep in an ever-mean tree (they give me rashes.) #498 the “Giant Q Tip”, the puppies play in the park while Vic takes a leg stretching stroll.
On to the next cache, which was a troll, grabbed it, tagged it #496 and moved on. #497... mohjoe walks up and plucks it right away, after I had been elbow deep in an ever-mean tree (they give me rashes.) #498 the “Giant Q Tip”, the puppies play in the park while Vic takes a leg stretching stroll.
After finding the cache, I take pics of the flowers in the park’s garden.
# 499 is a cache with a tale of dental departure along the cowboy trail. I stayed in the van trying to get the logs in the Palm, make sure our count was right and doing general “desk” work. They were taking a bit, so I walked out to see if I could help, glanced left, glanced right, took a few steps, glanced and got it!
I would have gloated a bit more than I did, but I know for every DNF we search and search for, walk away, go back and check one more place and still don’t find, other cachers often spot it right off. “This was our first tank cache! Found it in 30 seconds, TFTC.” Grrrrrr!
On to the Ashfall! As we near the area we stop and take a few pics. There is just something about rolling hills dotted with scrub pines that calls to me... Aaaah, another reason to love caching, plenty of photo ops!
There was a fair breeze blowing when we walked up to the visitor’s center. There they had lots of information and educational displays and you could watch the conservation work being done through a big window. There was even a whiteboard with the last discoveries listed; the latest was the day before our visit.
Outside, there was a discovery station where children (me included) could dig, scrape, and brush away sand to find bones. From there we took the walkway to the rhino barn. Along here there were signs using the concrete walkway as a big time line. Jens jumped over the span of human existence like he was skipping a rope.
What had created the Ashfalls area was a volcanic explosion in
Stepping through the years, at every sign, Jens would make an exaggerated jump which prompted mohjoe to ask what he was doing. “It’s leap year” I replied, “Oh!…..huh?” Two more hops and we were at the rhino barn,..barn? No hayloft, no stalls, no harnesses hanging up, no barn aroma and it wasn’t even painted red!
But it was full of fossil horses, camels, and rhino’s all lying in situ, babies near mothers, horses near tortoises, camels in ash trays. This is really a fascinating display and there are graphics along the walls explaining how this all came to be. We read the signs and learned that many of the individual fossils had been given names. Getting down to business, we note the answers to the logging questions in the Palm and return to the visitor center to get a pin for my cache hat.
Cache #500, #12 EC... we had hit a milestone plus had qualified for the Gold Earthcache Master’s Pin, and did our victory dance in the blowing ash of the cache!
We had accomplished our plans and the return trip would be starting us towards the 1000 milestone. We DNF on the first and head for the next one. It is described as a large container that needed certain supplies to open the container. Toothpick, tooth brush, dog biscuits, birdseed and your fingers. When we pull into the small town, we notice vendor tents and people lining the streets. Vic drove toward the coordinates, but people were lining the street everywhere and we figured a retreat was in order. Two parades in two weeks! We hit anymore and we’ll have to make a cacher’s float. Hmm, the van is green, it could be a big ammo can and we could make a big yellow Etrex for the roof, a big log with lots of Smileys and TFTC’s on the back and toss out swag to the future cachers along the route! Or maybe not…Vic is rolling her eyes at me.
Anyway, where was I? Ok… it may be quite awhile before we find out why I raided my neighbor’s bird feeder and exactly how oral hygiene items can open a cache container and what that container may be. We will have to find out. Some time.
We ended up DNF on another cache and decided today’s hunt was over. The rest of the trip was uneventful except for the deer incident. I was preoccupied (meaning that I had dozed off) when Vic dramatically slowed down and my attention was brought to the road in front of us. There was a doe in the other lane of the highway, just standing there with traffic approaching in both lanes, but she was only looking in our direction. As a fawn followed her onto the road she leapt for the ditch but the fawn stood in our lane just staring at us. Finally when we were a couple of hundred feet away, the fawn bolted off the road. We got to watch both the doe and fawn bounce above the tasseled corn like carousel horses. The most amazing thing was… they had crossed within 20 feet of a deer crossing sign!
The puppies and I spent the next day catching up on the neglected lawn work, Vic did laundry and we all ate the first tomatoes from the garden and things got back to normal.
No more trips for a while...
”Dear?”... ”You forgot? Again?”
“Ha ha... Uh… ?"
"Have you heard about the
A couple of empty-nesters who caught the caching bug not realizing it was incurable. So if we’re found in the woods waltzing with Garmins, lifting lampskirts while tying our shoe or looking for “gum” underneath benches, be sure to stay away... it’s contagious and the only temporary relief can be found in finding bison’s, ammo’s, nano’s, or passing coins and spreading travel bugs!
Publisher's Note: Catsnfish write the periodic column The Adventures of Catsnfish. Subscribe (free) to The Online Geocacher to get an email alert when a new article is published.
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