Numeric, No A.L.F.A.*

*Alien Life Forms Apparent

   We finished our run for the last alpha character, so now it was down to four numeric characters still needed to complete the challenge. 4,7,0,1 in enough different directions from our home in Omaha to make a compass dizzy. And of course they were all too far away for a single run to get them all. So the challenge was put on the back burner for a bit.

                                           {insert 30 seconds of Jeopardy theme}

   "Joe, " she actually said ‘Dear' again, but I'm letting it slide this time. "Let's get the number 4 near  Norfolk tomorrow." "Can you phrase that in the form of a question?"..."Can we get the... Hey! Do you wanna cache or not??" Ok .....when Vic is in the mood to cache, we cache, so I started running pocket queries and getting everything set up for the electronics while she started gathering items we needed to pack into Van Camp II. (It has earned the stripes.) I also did a little experimenting with gsak and the Palms (we picked up a used M130 for Vic, she doesn't like to share things like that, in other words, I'm too slow giving her all the information she wants, when she wants it.) Eventually I'll get all the data on all of our tools the way I like it....just not today.

     Because Norfolk is in Nebraska and there are some counties we can pick up with minimal detouring, say within, Oh 100 miles or so, we will be working on 3 challenges;  the Nebraska 93 County, the Nebraska Delorme and the Alphanumeric. So I ran route queries, and destination queries to load into gsak. Eliminating any caches that had 2 or more dnf's, I exported to Streets and Trips and tried my experiment on the palms. Not much of an experiment but I hadn't even thought about it before. I wanted to see if I could have the gsak smart name be the displayed name on the palms. After hot synching, I find I hadn't figured it out yet, I will, but now I need to go to the map and narrow down the caches by counties. I decided to run another query and expand our search area to include another 2 counties that I could add with minimal detour distance.

       Ok everything I want is in gsak and I redo my map and customize the pushpins and then load our Legends and the electronics end is taken care of! Maybe.. did I forget something? Oh well, time to load the van. We'll be traveling light since we plan on it being just a daytrip. Some food for us and Wedge, the cache bag, our bucket of McToys and the laptop. And tinfoil, although we wouldn't be leaving Nebraska today, it's best to be prepared.

     We would be going a route we had traveled before without enough foresight to have grabbed the needed cache for this challenge, but that's ok we would see some fun things today.

    Our first cache of the day was a unique cache at a baseball diamond. It was good for all of us to stretch the legs a bit and run the bases. Next we visited an arboretum with a pond that was frozen over. After the hike around the water feature and grabbing the cache, Vic let Wedge exercise her curiosity and allowed her out on to the ice. About 3 feet out she decides she doesn't like it and gives us a big ‘what do I do' look, then the ice cracks just enough to let some water seep up onto her paws and .. picture Scooby just after he say's "R'uh R'oh R'aggy!", she panics and scrambles to shore slipping a few times, until claws hit dirt, then she is off like a rocket to the extent of her retractable leash, which she reaches with a jolt. It takes a few minutes to get her calmed down without any Scooby snacks and she keeps us between her and that nasty, wicked pond, all the way back to the van.

      Driving towards the next cache we spot an unusual park that we'll come back to after the cache. Going past the cache, we had to turn around, and as we did, a horse came trotting up to the roadside fence VISITORS! VISITORS! and followed us around to the corner , where we began looking for the cache across the street. After a quick find and getting back into the van, we took a few pics of the horse. I could have sworn its tail was wagging just like a dog's, you know, that happy tail dance that starts at the middle of the spine and bounces the whole rear end all over the place and the tooth baring, snarly grin that goes with it? That was some excited horse!! Waving goodbye, we go back past the park and grab some pics of the happy trees and a harrow tooth dragon. Vic put it best when she said, "We always suspected the trees were laughing at us while we cached, now we have proof!"

   "Wow look at the size of that hawk!" "That's got a white head Vic, it's an eagle." "What??" Gravel crunched as she slowed down and eased onto the shoulder, then began to back up. "Get a pic! get a pic! I've never seen a bald eagle before!" I zoomed the pocket digital all the way and took a few pics before it soared off of the tree branch and was completely out of range. Once again the digital camera came up short in the focus dept. and the results were less than spectacular. I just might have to use this incident to justify a 400mm or longer lens for my old 35mm SLR. Ooh and an auto-winder and of course a new case to hold it all and my old neck strap is kind of ratty. Wait,... I need to dream bigger, a brand spanking new DSLR with all the bells, whistles and mega pixels and lens' to go with it. Hey if Vic can justify a laptop and mapping software for our cache trips, I can justify a DSLR!  I had a feeling though, that the  bank account would tell me there just ain't no justice in this world.....or new camera equipment in the near future.

   Our next stop we rectify a DNF from an earlier trip this way. How did we miss that nano before? It was close to a mural on the side of a building. We've seen quite a few murals on small town buildings and I have to say I'm all for the practice. Hmmm a coffee table book with 2 page spreads of rural America's answer to hometown pride and civic beautification. I may have a new mission! Ok maybe a sub-hobby, we'll see.

     Time to cross the line into our uncached county, in search of not only the coveted smiley but shaded territory as well. Streets and Trips points us the way, and I read off the description from gsak on the laptop, armed with waypoints in the legends, we tackle the cache without too much difficulty. Taking the Palm out of it's belt case, I scroll down to find the listed name and .. keep scrolling .. keep scrolling. Not there, why wouldn't it......DOH. I thought I had forgotten something! Now I knew what it was. We've really got to develop a script or checklist  or something to make sure I get everything we need for these trips loaded into all of the electronics. I tell Vic she needs to learn how to do all this also and she just says "Like I'm going caching without you? Noo .. but you go to Alabama and cache without me? I wouldn't do that to you!" she was saying all this with a smile on her face.

  Earlier in the month I had gone on a business trip with a non-caching coworker to visit our company's plants in Alabama . We had a fair amount of time to plan the trip and I had convinced my coworker, let's call her Sally, (Shari likes that name and told me I should use it) to try a few caches with me. Wanting to expose her to as many types of caches as possible in hopes of creating a recruit to the fascination, I line up a good selection ahead of time and have them preloaded into Streets and Trips and one of our spare etrexes. Arriving in Huntsville in the late afternoon, we rent a car and start our adventure. We DNF the first cache after about 10 minutes of searching. Next up is an EarthCache in Huntsville , we find parking and go down some steps to a cool spring with water spraying out of the limestone.

  What a nice downtown area, I gathered the logging data, then we walked around and generally made our way to another cache. Sally had made this business trip several times before and said "This is cool, I never would have known this area was here!" and I told her that's what caching can be, a tour guide that takes you to neat places, and you don't have to tip or listen to bad jokes. Wait a minute.. she was with me, she still had to hear the bad jokes. We walk along the pond created by the spring, to a pretty little bridge with throngs of Koi below, eagerly awaiting dropped morsels. It was a very pretty setting especially with the leaves beginning to turn in northern Alabama. Enjoying the view while having a stealthy look around, we both spot the nano at the same time, Sally is catching on quickly. I sign the log and add her name too.

     Our next cache was one of those diabolical, evil, magnetic micro's attached to several tons of ferrous metal with all sorts of nooks, crannies, wheels and gears. The dreaded tank cache! although this one was technically an artillery piece. I looked, Sally looked, she asked a few questions, and we looked some more. I asked how long she wanted to look and warned I usually dnf on tank caches. She looked some more and dang if she didn't come up with it. She was proud of herself and rightly so!

   Heading to our destination, we have dinner, check in to our rooms and meet up the next morning for our plant tours. We spend a few hours at the first plant and finish up talking with an engineer that is a friend of Sally's about our upcoming visit to the "Bat Cave" EarthCache and we find out that he's a cacher also. He gives us the advice to wear a poncho..with a hood.

       Lunchtime, we head over to the other plant. Sally meets another friend for lunch and skipping my own lunchtime meal, I take a little caching tour of the plant area. After a nice walk in far more pleasant weather than I had left back home, I head back to the plant with 2 more smileys under my belt.

 Time for work again, Sally has a vendor meeting to attend and I meet with my counterpart. Talk gets around to caching and explaining what it is, when a head pops out of the cubicle behind us and says "You're a cacher too?" so we have a nice discussion and we're given some more advice for the bat cave, "You really, really, want to have a poncho with a hood!"

   Our workday is over so we stop at a store to buy.... souvenir sweatshirts and yes poncho's. If five out of five people say you need them, I take that as a good indicator that I would be foolish to ignore the advice. Besides, Sally was going out to dinner after our bat event and didn't want to be malodorous.

   Arriving before dusk, we read the informational signs, and complete the logging tasks as we anticipate darkness and a horde of winged creatures to emerge. As darkness descends, we hear a few squeaky sounds and spot a large hawk circling above, a few more minutes and we see a few small bats, waiting a bit longer, we see a few more , but not the mass exodus we had expected. To be fair, it was off season, this is a nursery cave with seasonal activity, but we weren't disappointed. We had seen bats at the Bat Cave, but not a robin in sight. Walking carefully back to the rental, guess who forgot his flashlight, we find an example of Southern Hospitality in the form of four ball caps on the hood of the car. The person Sally had met for lunch drove all the way out to drop them off.

   I was going to meet The Alabama Rambler at the bat cave, for my AGA initiation run, but he called to say he was running late due to a big accident that had snarled up traffic, we would meet up at the hotel.

    I didn't have to wait too long. The moment had come! TAR was out in the hotel parking lot, waiting to take me on a cache run. The man whose forum title is "Staunch Defender of Everything Lame" and the publisher of my stories. Hmmm, gotsta think about that one. We cached for a few hours, covered a lot of territory,  mostly talking and getting to know one another as we searched cemeteries, parking lots and roadside signs. We did have one humorous event occur at a cache on an old log cabin. We looked, read the clues, read in the past logs about the cat that was rubbing up  against our legs, even asked the cat where the cache was.. just like in the logs. Working our way around the building TAR spots a pinecone up under the eave and asked if I could grab it. Being vertically challenged, I couldn't reach it, so TAR reached out and took hold of it. The pinecone didn't particularly care for being grabbed, flapped its wings and taking advantage of the surprise that caused, flew off to freedom. It turned out to be a bat, so this night was just full of bats and I still hadn't seen a single robin. They must have migrated further South.

  After a few hours and not having the stamina of The Alabama Rambler, I had him drop me off back at the hotel. It had been a very good night, but a long day. I went to sleep and he began his long journey back home. A day or so later, I get an email telling me the story of the Great Chicken Caper that happened on his way home that night. It's published here in the magazine also, (shows you how far behind I am on my stories!!) and it's hilarious.

  Waking the next morning, Sally and I catch our flights home and I fill Vic in on my solo?? adventures. And what do I get for that? Teasing, just like she is doing now.

   So where was I? Oh yeah, marked the cache as found in gsak cause we couldn't log it in the palm. Then on to a previous DNF, you remember the one with dental hygiene articles required? We find the cache no problem, but opening it to sign the log just isn't clicking, picking or flossing with us. Giving it a game try and knocking on the cache owner's door with no answer, we again claim the DNF and head home.

   Thanksgiving is just three workdays away, we don't have my boys this year, so Vic and I plan to do whatever it takes to complete the Alphanumeric by Cacher's Name Challenge. Thursday we will go south to collect counties and a KC "0" and Friday we'll go to northwest Iowa and then south from there.

  I'll spare you the details of getting all the data together, but I do get it all right this time. On Wednesday one of us raises the question "What do we do with Wedge?" since our normal housesitter/animal feeders have plans for the day, we ask Wedge if she wants to go caching, she cocks her head at us once to one side, then to the other and then cocks it even more, then starts in with the happy tail dance, "OK, OK, Wedge quit horsing around! You can go!"

By catsnfish

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.