94%

25 March, 2011

During my careers as both student and teacher, 94% was pretty good, but on my last geocaching trip that 94% was laughing at me.  14/15 caches found for the day - the last one was the one we couldn't find!

It was a cold and dreary March morning.  Add in some snowflakes and low 30s temperature for good measure and you'll have an appropriate setting of the most recent outing for Woodhick803 and me.  We headed off to Little Beaver State Park to finish the caches there that we didn't have time to look for last trip.

Here I am, all bundled up (sans hood for the photo), even wearing my warmest long johns which had already been put away for the season.  This was quite an usual cache in that it wasn't hidden, but that was what made it tricky to find.  We get so used to looking on the ground, under leaves, or even in rock crevices, that we sometimes forget to look up.

You can see how the cache owner has wrapped rope around the tree to enable the finders to lower the cache.  Pretty clever.

I'm easily distracted on our geocaching trips.  I named this Canada goose Bert and it looks like he's banded.  Bert and friends were honking and hooting that morning at Little Beaver State Park.  I love to watch them come in for a water landing.

We headed on to New, WV, which is soooo new that it isn't even there, although the road sign is.  Again I got distracted - see the icicles?  Brrrrr!!!!










Woodhick803 (aka Dan, my big bother, er, brother) is like a little kid hunting for hidden treasure or maybe wanting to get to the Christmas presents first when it comes to geocaching.  It's an ongoing joke, but true, that he's out of the car and on the prowl before I even have the door open.  Here he is looking through the SWAG (stuff we all get) at the New Cache.

By this time we were both ready for lunch.  After a couple of quick finds,we had some pretty good taco salads at Paco's in beautiful downtown Ghent.

This trip, as our last, took us to Coal City.  This time, however, we traveled over the river and definitely through the woods and through such metropolitan areas (snicker) as Odd and Josephine.  Let me not forget, either, such places as Pigshin Hollow and Hoo-Hoo Hollow.  By the way, if you pronounced that word "hollow", you're not from West Virginia.  Any home grown person would know that it's "holler".  Don't ask me why.  I don't know.

 Yes, that's most definitely an arm and hand rising up from this gravesite.  Pretty spooky, huh?  We almost missed the cache near this cemetery; several cachers before us had commented that they couldn't find it, sending Woodhick803 and me into a lengthy discussion of whether or not we should go looking for it.  Woodhick found it (and it had nothing to do with this scene).  He says you have to look for it where it is, not where it isn't.  Well, duh!  He was quite tickled with himself for that find.

So that brings us to Lake Stephens, scene of the elusive 15th cache.  We looked up the hill; we looked down the hill; we looked where our GPS units led us; we looked where our GPS units didn't lead us.  But obviously we kept on looking where the cache wasn't, instead of where it was.  94%.  Argh...........

Get outside and play!