Got home about an hour ago from Geocaching. Wiped out but feeling good. I uploaded pictures into each of the cache sites. We did three, intended to do four, but the third one kicked our collective asses. Damn. It was a gorgeous day, we seized it. We enjoyed it greatly.
Each time I go out I am amazed at how I am feeling on the trails. What would have killed me or at least knocked me on my ass six months ago now is cake. The really hard stuff is the bushwhacking off-trail kind of stuff you sometimes have to do to get to the hiding places. The kids and I wore our sport sandals because each of the cache pages said the terrain was 2 on a scale of 1-5. The third one should be changed to a three. I got poked in the toes and the sides of my feet several times by dry, sharp branches. I'm in agony. But, we found the little sucker. It wasn't easy. But we found it.
The first cache of the day was a fire lookout tower in the Milford NH area called Federal Hill. Gorgeous views, and what a lovely day. I could have spent the afternoon up there just drinking water and watching the world. But no. Geoff had me scared shitless more than one time at the top of that damn thing. I was so convinced he was going to fall right out the railings. The dogs tried to join us up there... the steps were narrow and scary, and they made it half way before quitting. Kinger came down carefully, but Jack was reluctant as all hell. Doug had to coax him for quite a while. This cache was a "multi" cache, meaning that you had to find a location with the GPS which would give you the actual cache location. That's why we had to climb the tower. The coordinates were on the stairs on two different levels. We found the cache itself easy and went off to the second one.
Cache two was fairly easy. Not too far away, the trails were well maintained, and I took a picture of the kids in the cornfield pretending to be Submit and Jedidiah types "Children of the Corn," as it were.
We took this picture specifically because we thought Chris Kelly would laugh. I'll be emailing it to him later. We couldn't get the kids to just stand there looking like zombies. They didn't get it. They thought they were supposed to be like MONSTER kids, which is why their hands are up in clawlike ways. We had to tell Jessica the kids in the movie are like the kids on the Simpson's spoof "The Bloodening," and then she understood but by then Geoff was out of the cornfield so I couldn't get a picture of him.
The cache itself was kind of hard to find. I had to climb across some barbed wire in my sandals, I sent the kids around another way and told them to watch where they were going. It wasn't easy. We finally got to it, logged it and split. We figured we had time for two more.
So we headed off to the third one.
It was in the Tucker Brook area, not far from where we already were and Doug said there were two different caches in that same trail area. So we did the first. It too was a multipart cache, with five total coordinates. The coords to get there and park, the first clue, second clue and third clue, and finally the cache. Easy peasey.
Not.
Getting there and parking was easy. The first two clue coordinates were easy. The third was way off trail and it hurt getting to it. I never saw it, I just hooked up with Doug after he found it. Then it was off to the cache. The coordinates had us climb up a motherfuckinghuge hill of granite, to look DOWN on the opposite side of the gulley, to halfway up another wall of granite where the cache was.
We climbed UP there to look DOWN on the thing. Then we had to climb down again, and around and up. Fuckers. The person who built that one should get two in the hat. I wanted to hike back to the car the way we came in, but Doug insisted that the heavy light shining about 800 feet away from us was the clear cut for the power lines, under which we were parked. We disagreed about it for a while and went with his idea to walk to the light, believing it was the clear cut, and then boom -- the car.
And he was, of course, correct. We were .2 miles from the car when we found the cache. It was right by the parking area, only we had to go all the way the hell from here to Cleveland to find the clues to get the stupid thing.
Actually, even thougit was a lot of fun and I'm glad Doug was right and I went willingly but doubtfully with him.
We blew off finding the fourth cache of the day, even though we were probably a half mile total from it. It follows the creek trail from the waterfall, and we were a million miles from there. It's the kind of geocache that looks incredibly easy. Perhaps we'll drag my mother with us on that one, as well as a few other low difficulty ones in southern NH during her visit here next week.
It seemed to take forever to get home. We ordered a pizza because we got back here after 8pm. The dogs are out cold. Doug is horizontal, and I need to put fresh sheets on Geoff's bed so he can go to bed too. So I ought to go. Go visit the links to the cache sites and scroll down to the comments for "Team Screamapillar" to see our pictures. It was a good day.
me peeking through the steps at Jessica at the Federal Hill Geocache
Geoff is sayin' "Move the hell out of my way, stupidassed dog!"
Jackie wouldn't budge. He was scared shitless.
Tomorrow we're off to Rockport (again) for a birthday party for my friend Gregg and Karry's daughter. There's a geocache not far from their house that looks easy as pie...
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