Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Our first Winter hunt

We needed a new nemesis, one of those you lay in bed thinking about, so we went and got one. A four star blankety blank that apparently isn't anything I can touch or see, cause I swear I touched everything. One where you end up with filthy hands from probing every nook and cranny and dirty clothes from laying on the ground in a tantrum. Well, not a tantrum, not yet. It was only our first attempt. Laying on a dirty bridge, yes, reaching as far under the bridge as we could, hoping the trolls don't bite, fending off helpful passersby, hoping they don't call the cops to report escaped mental patients or druggies searching for their stash. This hide has been described as evil, mean, and dangerous. Perfect! I wonder how many tries this one will take?

We found several of the commonly seen types. Teeny magnets under park benches, keyholders stuck to this and that, under pole caps, hanging in trees, at the end of a "geotrail" that many caching shoes have pressed into the long green grasses. We need these as much as a nemesis. It's no fun if you don't find anything but new ways to curse your fellow geocachers. There was one really cute one stuffed into a large snail's shell. It was cold all day long, too. We had a frost advisory the night before so I wasn't surprised to have a chilly morning. I kept thinking it would warm up, but even though the sun was out all day, it never seemed to warm up a smidge. By the time we made each find and got back to the car my middle was chilly and my fingers were frigid. This was our first winter hunt. BRRR!

Hello finally got her dim sum lunch. I never had that so she made the choices and I tried them all. Most of them I really liked. Even the ones that didn't rock my world weren't icky. I'd like to try some of the other stuff I saw. There were so many different things, it might take 10 visits to try them all. However, I'm not eating a chicken foot, Hello, so just go ahead and take that into your heart. Nor the really slimey stuff, the stuff that would make slime go, "EW! SLIME!" I'll ask for a fork next time, too, since I sent some of the food flying and spasticly knocked over my Coke while wrangling my chopsticks. Despite that challenge, I was absolutely stuffed when we finished.
We took a leisurely looksee in an aquarium shop on the way back to the car. They had the most adorable little green turtles, no bigger than a half dollar. And a weird thing with a sucker on his head that I thought was icky and Hello wanted to pet. That's typical of us. Pretty little nemo fish, a cool stingray, some strange large silver fish with an indescribable expression on it's face that reminded me of an uncle. It was a pretty cool fish, like a shiny silver dinner plate with a loooooooooooong face.
We stopped for coffee and saw a rabbit-eared dog. We loitered outside a small playground, making parents nervous, waiting for them to take their children in out of the cold, which they didn't, so we just went ahead and dug through the bushes anyway and took the looks and questions. We loitered around a train station, waiting for the train to leave with it's fantastically tattooed and hard staring engineer before we began to peer under and over power boxes and climb atop fences.
All micros all day long, so at the last we went in search of a regular sized cache so we could drop off some travel bugs who needed to move on. I was about to climb down a creek bank to look under a bridge, looking it over first, like I do, considering the odds of a broken arm or snake attack, and I saw a huge gigantic spider! It was a monster, right where I planned to step on my way down, HUGE, maybe possessed of poisonous and blood dripping fangs.....no wait. It's plastic. Yeah, the cache is under the bridge. So we dropped in our bugs and stuffed a bunch of fun little toys in it as well, left the spider where he sat, and about called it a day.