Blog Template Musings about Geocaching: Badgers and Caches and Buses . . . Oh My!

Musings about Geocaching

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Badgers and Caches and Buses . . . Oh My!

We met in the morning in the parking lot near the Discovery Center, and near a great cache by badgerdawg. The cammo was clever, as was the hint: "Alcatraz"

The drivers gathered around and decisions were made about which direction each group would go. Some of the better-equipped Jeeps decided to go one way. Here is a picture of the line of Jeeps later in the day, with Splashette and $kimmer in a "time out," in an image "Photoshopped" a bit by SD Rowdies.

Our group had thirteen 4WD vehicles, all with high clearance, but only a few that were really well-equipped. With what happened later in the day, it was good that Karstic had all the tools necessary to fix someone else's stupid mistake.

This guy, and another vehicle, zoomed past us while we stopped to find a cache. We had gone ahead of the rest of the group in order to get back to town early, so we were the first to drive around the corner and see this . . .



BRA's first comment was, "You stupid jackass." That was followed very quickly by "Is anyone hurt?" as the three of us ran up to the overturned truck.

Needless to say, our quick trip back to town was delayed for a long time, and not just by the overturned truck, but by the three lost buses.



BRA leans over to ask the bus driver, "Are you lost?"





While the buses tried to negotiate the narrow road, in reverse, several of us in the group had a little fun in front of the bus.



After the buses finally backed up to a place where we could get past them, we made it back to town and to the Event in the park later in the afternoon. I had a great time, and even won a couple of items in the raffle, with a couple of the tickets T.R. Violin gave me when he left early.

That night we had a party at the Blonds Run Amuck Big Bear hideout. We had great fun visiting with M2, SlabyFam, FlagMan, and Team Reid and other people who stopped by. After things quieted down later in the evening—much later—BRA decided it was time to visit the SoCal 4X4 group camping at the Serrano campground. We piled into TrailGators Durango and made a complete tour of the campground, visiting some of the loops more than once, before finally finding the group. Lostlad got out his laptop and logged onto the GC.com site for us to see if the new cache, placed earlier in the day by the group in the Jeeps, had been published yet.

It had. We wrote the coordinates down on a used styrofoam cut and soon we were off in our quest for a FTF, after a quick trip back to the house to get flashlights and to change vehicles again.

It took some driving around before we finally found the Old Mill Road going in the correct direction for the cache. As we made our way to the cache, I remembered SlabyDad giving us verbal directions earlier in the evening, saying "You can find it." I said to BRA, "No way we could have found this without the coordinates."

She laughed and agreed with me because we made one more wrong turn before finally finding the trail near what TrailGators called the "Red Trolley." It was about .12 to the cache and the trail got quite steep for a little stretch. I ended up bushwhacking over some manzanita bushes to get to the cache, while the other three walked back to the trail to get to the location by an easier path.

They found the container and I took a picture to document our FTF on the cache, at 12:54 in the morning.



We took our pick of the great swag in the container and wrote down the numbers for the many TBs in the cache, including four Jeep TBs: a YJTB, WJTB, GJTB, and a new-this-year RJTB. I retrieved the White Jeep to bring back to San Diego County with me. I have an idea for a cache, but have to wait until it cools off before I can get out that way to place the container. The Jeep will go into that container when I put it out.

It was a really great day, from the start in the parking lot, to the return trip from our FTF, in the wee hours of the next day.


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