Geocaching the Extremes

My first geocaching trip back in November was in the rain and in the upper 40s. A few weeks later we geocached in the sleet. When we saw the temp was going to hit 100 today, we knew just what we had to do.

I ran a query for close caches that were on easy terrain (much too hot to go bushwhacking today!), fairly low difficulty, and had been found recently. We picked the closest two.

The first was Which one holds the key and we approached from the wrong side and our GPS led us down a gravel road where lots of people were proud to post Keep Out and Private and No Tresspassing and Beware of Dog signs. It looked a bit like the kind of place where the greetings might involve a shotgun. We even passed a warning sign for Deaf Child, which I'd never seen before.

After coming to a dead end and still being a tenth of a mile away, we backtracked and found another route. Once there, this one was an easy park and grab.

Next we were off to Under New Iron Pipe, which refers to one of those cell phone towers disguised as a tall ugly pine tree. A rather troubled automobile sat nearby.

Feeling lucky, we decided to grab a third before heading back, so we just did a quick check to see what was close (ignoring our initial carefully crafted list of caches) and ventured over to Hill House View. The spanish style mansion on the hill was nice and we had an excellent view of it, but we were here for the cache. A walk through the park, which was more than we wanted to do when the heat index was 110, and we came up about 50 feet short of the cache. It was in the woods.

Now, we said we weren't going in the woods. And these woods had something special. Ivy. Lots of it. The English kind. And the Poison kind.

Oh, what the heck, we came this far, right? We ventured in and poked around a bit, mostly mumbling about how hot it was and wondering what the ratio of poison to English ivy was. After a few minutes of half-hearted attempt, we gave up. I had to go find a bottle of Tecnu after that. I've never been affected by Poison Ivy before, but no sense in taking a chance.

When will we learn to stick to our gameplan? Geocaching isn't a sport or a hobby. It's an addiction.

Now we'll have to wait a while before geocaching in the snow.

Labels: geocaching

Posted by Chris on 8/03/2006 10:54:00 AM :: Permalink   
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