SNAKES ALIVE!

After a long hiatus from geocaching, the GeoKidz and I finally had a chance to jump back into our favorite game/sport/obsession this weekend! Saturday, we attended the monthly meeting of the Georgia Geocacher’s Association, which was held this month at Little Mulberry Park in Dacula.

The feature presentation this month was given by Dr. Mark Patterson of the Georgia herpetological Society, with assistance from his slithery friends, the snakes.  Not just any snakes, mind you… but snakes that are native to and prevelent in our backyards (literally) here in Gwinnett and Walton counties.  He brought out some really beautiful critters, such as the black rat snake, the red rat snake (a/k/a “corn snakes”), the pine snake and even a small copperhead. (Don’t worry, the copperhead was kept in a sturdy plexiglass box the entire time!)

Photo Courtesy of The Georgia Geocacher's Association (www.ggaonline.org)

Dr. Patterson provided a wealth of information about these species.  He discussed their habitats, what they feed on (mostly rats and mice, so they are actually good to have around. Since we now live in a very old farmhouse in a big ole meadow… I’m good with that. 😉 ), and what to do if you encounter a snake (screaming and running may be understandable, but unless it’s venomous, don’t kill it!).  Did you know that one lone rat snake can curtail the rat/mouse population in its immediate area by over 19,000 rodents a year???? Before you aim that gun, think of all 19,000 of those mice moving into your home in the absence of their crowd-controlling predator!

Dr. Patterson also discussed what to do if you are bitten by a venomous snake.  First, don’t panic and run.  Panicking and running will increase your heart rate and your adrenaline production – both of which will only serve to speed up the spread of the venom throughout your body. Definitely not what you want to happen!  Call 911 and do your best to stay calm.  Do not apply a tourniquet, and do not do the old “cutting into the wound and sucking out the poison” routine you’ve heard about your whole life.  All that does is make you bleed more and introduce a whole slew of new germs into your wound, greatly increasing your chances of infection.

The good news, according to Dr. Patterson, is that an extremely small number of people actually die each year from snake bits.  I cannot recall the exact statistics, but the number is actually quite miniscule.  So, the good news is that if you get bit, chances are you will make it just fine, so long as you seek prompt medical attention.  Folks who have a much higher risk of complications from snake bites are the very young, the very old, and people with fragile immune systems.  (Side note to any EMS folks out there…feel free to chime in on this in the comments and correct, add to, or otherwise expound on this info. You know WAY more than I do about this stuff!!!)

All in all, it was a fantastic meeting.  The GeoKidz and I had a great time.  We also kicked butt in the raffle following the snake presentation. GeoKid2 won a key chain for his collection, and I won a nifty little tote bag with the Georgia Geocacher’s Association logo on the front.  We also met many other geocachers, some of whom we’ve “met” online discussing caches and events, but never in person.

After the meeting, the GeoKids and I went out in search of geocaches.  It’s been too many months since we’d done so, and were just itching to get back into it. 🙂 We found one on Saturday, and then three on Sunday afternoon… including that pesky one hidden at the Oasis Bowling alley that we’ve searched for over the course of at least six months! And yes…we’d walked right past it a trillion times and somehow missed it. Till yesterday! Ha!

Sunday afternoon, we also went to Tribble Mill Park, which is a veritable gold mine of geocaches. We finished finding the last two of a series of caches honoring John Wayne: The Good (which we found on 01/02/11), The Bad, and The Ugly.  The kids really enjoyed searching these out.  As we walked back to the car, my eight-year-old GeoKid said very seriously, “I love nature.  It’s all beautiful and stuff!”

And that’s what it’s all about. 🙂

Happy hunting, everyone!

What a Month!

As I mentioned earlier this week, April was one massive whirlwind of events!  Some were good, some not so good, but all of them were exhausting. 😉 Thank God for coffee, that’s all I can say – ha!

It all started with the littlest GeoKidz and I attending the Georgia Geocacher’s Association April meeting at Mistletoe State Park in or near Augusta, GA.  Yes, during Masters weekend! I am not a golf fan in the least, so I didn’t much care about all the fuss over who’s playing in the Masters, who’s winning, who’s losing… WHO CARES?! 😉 (Sorry to all golf fans out there – no offense intended… I’m just not into sports much at all.).  The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and it was a PERFECT day to be outside.  Of course, the pollen count that day was roughly ten trillion, so the Kidz and I were all stuffy and fighting off pollen-induced sore throats.   

The highlight of the day was the game of “human checkers” that the event organizers put together.  I have pics on my camera that I hope to download tonight (I’ve been saying that for two weeks, so don’t hold your breath TOO much… I put the “PRO” in “Procrastination”…got it down to an art form. 😉 )  They had cut out huge plywood squares big enough for folks to stand on, and painted them red and black.  The people playing the red checkers were given red t-shirts and red bandanas.  The black checker people had black t-shirts and black bandanas. 🙂 At each end of the checkerboard, there were ladders upon which the team captains sat.  They had a perfect overview of the board and could order their people where to move.   GeoKid2 had been dying to play checkers all day, so he jumped right in as a black checker. 🙂 He had a great time playing for the first five or ten minutes, then he was “jumped” by the red team – game over for the little fella! He took it in stride though and thought it was all just the funniest thing!  After the game, the kids and I took off and found a couple geocaches hidden in the park.  There are several more I want to find, but since this was approximately two-and-a-half hours from home and it was getting late in the day, we decided it was best to go ahead and mosey on back towards Loganville and call it a day. 🙂  I’m pretty sure that day was the only day we were able to get out and hunt some caches… stupid “real life,” intruding on my hiking/playing time! Grrr! Ah well, it was better than nothing. 🙂

My Prodigal Son (GeoTeen2) returned home on April 21 – a/k/a the Thursday before Good Friday, a/k/a “Maundy Thursday.”  So far, so good.   Keep your fingers crossed and send up the prayers that he stays on track this time and continues doing what is good (and court-ordered – lol) and avoiding what is bad.  🙂  Easter was the usual whirlwind of activities, culminating in a beautiful Easter service and then the traditional dinner and egg hunt at the in-laws’ house. 

This past weekend, the Geokidz and I – yes, all four of them! – went camping together.  GeoKid2 is wrapping up his first year in cub scouts (awww….cute!) and this was the annual “Family Camping” event held up at Mount Rainey Mountain near Clayton, GA.  We had a GREAT time (except for GeoTeen1, who is terrified of the dark and the woods… .and seeing as how there wasn’t much anything by way of city lights or any lights in the camping area after sundown… she stayed curled up in a ball in the tent zipped up tight while the rest of us roasted marshmallows. She refused to come out or even budge from her hidey-corner till daylight).  GeoKid1 had his first-ever experiences shooting BB guns and bows & arrows…he earned a couple cub scout belt loops for his accomplishments.  GeoTeen2 likewise got to partake of the shooting of BBs and pointy things, as well as saving the day and helping me get the camp fire started when it was being stubborn. 🙂

All in all, April was fantastic… lots of great things happened, some rough things happened, but in the end, God is good and so is life. 🙂

Rock on, everyone!

Another Cache-Less Weekend, but….

Despite the gorgeous weather we had on Saturday, and the cloudy-but-still-nice weather we had today, I restrained myself from geocaching all weekend. (Gasp!) Yesterday, I folded & put away oodles of laundry and did the grocery shopping.  Today was church, then visit GeoTeen2, then come home and do dishes & dinner, and then dishes again.  Then, of course, there was the obligatory ten minutes before bedtime emergency homework project the littlest GeoKid forgot ALL about till JUST THEN…. ***rolling eyes*** So… yeah.  Here I am, not a cache found anywhere.

But…here’s where the good news comes in. 😀 Tomorrow is President’s Day.  School is IN tomorrow…a makeup day for the gazillion and one snowdays we had recently.  Hubby is working as usual. And me? Well, golly gee… my office, for some crazy reason (God bless them!!!!) decided that we’d be CLOSED tomorrow for President’s Day.  And, even rarer still…there is no crazy pressing deadline that is necessitating my presence in the office on the aforementioned official holiday. 😀 So… yeah.  Me, left to myself. No kids, no spouse, just me, the dog and the cats. 😀 WOOT!  So, in anticipation of this brief and exceedingly rare Window of Almost-Complete Freedom… I played at being a grown up all weekend and got a buncha stuff done.

So… Monday…tomorrow…. I’M ESCAPING!!!!!!! I mean, I’ll come BACK and all at the end of the day, but, you know, for a few hours there… I’m making a break for it!!!! 🙂  I’ve plotted out some caches I want to find in gorgeous Madison, Georgia – a town I’ve always WANTED to visit, but never have.  It has a ton of antebellum homes and such…legend has it that Madison was the town that was so beautiful, Gen. William T. Sherman refused to burn it down on his infamous March to the Sea.  One of the caches I’m hunting for is in a Civil-War era graveyard… you know how much I love history and old stuff, so I am soooooooooooooooo excited about the chance to finally explore this town.  It’s not too far from us – actually same distance or even a little closer than my office is to home, so… it’s easily doable. 🙂  Then, once I’m done in Madison, my GOAL is to head the opposite direction down to Stone Mountain Park.  There are oodles of caches hidden there, too, with a little more physical effort required to reach them.  I’ve wanted to do these for a while, as well, but as they are a bit more physically challenging than the ones I usually do, I wanted to wait until a day the GeoTeens were with me, or a day when I otherwise didn’t have the little kidlets with me.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to do many – or even ANY – of the Stone Mountain ones, but what the heck… it’s a goal, I’ll aim for it. 😀

My plan is to head directly to Madison after dropping off the little kids for school.  This will be really early in the day and traffic should be a breeze (everyone is going TO Atlanta, not AWAY from it like I will be), so I’m HOPING I can be done there and in Stone Mountain by like 1 or 1:30. …find one or two caches there at  Stone Mountain, then back to the daycare by 5 or 6 at the latest to pick up the littlest GeoKids… just like on a “normal” Monday.

I know I could stay home and sleep instead.  Or, if I wanted to be a real grownup, I know there are still plenty of chores here I could be doing.  But….

naaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! 😀

That’s why I stayed home all weekend (aside from visiting GeoTeen2 in juvie)…so I could get enough stuff done & taken care of so that I could ESCAPE tomorrow with a clear conscience. 😀  And, happily, I now have a camera to tote along to get pics of all my adventures, since, as you know, hubby very kindly got me one for valentine’s day.   Woot! 😀

I think this is very possibly the first time EVER I’ve actually LOOKED FORWARD to a MONDAY! Scary! LOL

Have a great night, y’all!!!! Adventure stories to follow….. 🙂

Our Bamboo Forest Adventure

Well, after a reasonably successful day of geocaching yesterday, I was more than ready to attack the bamboo forest in Gainesville today following our visit with my son at the YDC.

After visiting hours were over, GeoTeen1 (“GT1”) and I headed out for the forest. I’m very NOT familiar with this area, so I got a little turned around here & there till we finally found where we were supposed to be.  Parked our GeoVan at about 10 till 3, and away we went.

The forest itself was WAY COOL! It was smaller than I expected… for some reason, I’d thought it would be acres & acres of winding, serene trails.  It was much smaller than that, but nonetheless, it was still gorgeous. It was also several degrees cooler in the forest, which was good…I’d worn a long-sleeve shirt, and with it being in the low 60s today (yay – FINALLY!) it was kinda too warm.

We spent the first several minutes just wandering around the forest, enjoying the view.  It was like a whole ‘nother world in there!  A hawk would periodically screech, birds were chirping, etc. 😀 Very serene and pretty!  After our sight-seeing tour, we got down to business to try to find this durn geocache!

I remembered reading in the online logbooks that GPS reception was spotty at best in many places in the forest.  The bamboo, which was sky-high, created a very thick canopy between us and the sky.  The other geocacher’s experience proved to be true for us, as well.  I spent almost an hour zig-zagging back and forth and going into random circles.  Oooh, 38 feet left!….no, wait… 52 feet right…. no…. 23 feet back the other way… up this hill, down this hill, maybe over here, and…. argh! Finally, when the GPS told me AGAIN that it was 26 feet from me, I decided to give up using the durn thing (yes, still learning, slowly, not to rely too much on it!).  I randomly picked a spot (a tree, actually), and started circling around the tree, poking anything & everything with my walking stick to find the buried treasure. 🙂  Every circle around the tree, I went wider and wider until I was reasonably sure that it wasn’t there.  When I was done with that little exercise in dizziness, I picked a new spot to start over in.  After a couple more rotations around the new spot, I stopped and looked around for a minute.  If I were a geocache, where would I hide?  What doesn’t look quite right…what doesn’t quite fit in??? Suddenly, something caught my eye that of course I’d passed by ten billion times before.

I walked over to this area, and using my walking stick, nudged this thing (won’t say what it was so as to not spoil the fun for others) over a bit to see if anything was under it.  And… SUCCESS!!!!!! Yep, there it was, the small geocache container I’d been searching for forever. 🙂 OK, maybe not quite FOREVER, but it was starting to feel that way. 🙂 My GPS still insisted it was 48 feet in the opposite direction though, LOL! GT1 and I signed the logbook, swapped out some trinkets, and headed back home. 🙂

This was definitely an extremely neat, fun, awesome, and UNIQUE cache! 🙂 If you ever happen to be up this way, try to find this one. It’s absolutely beautiful scenery, and, whether you find it or not, you won’t be sorry you visited there. 🙂

If you want to see all the pics I took, click HERE. 🙂

Happy hunting, y’all!

 

A wonderfully wander-full day!

Today was our first-ever day that was entirely devoted to geocaching, from start to finish.  The GeoKidz and I were up and out the door by 9:30 a.m. (!!!!) We stopped by Dunkin Donuts for breakfast (the most important meal of the day, you know!) and were on our way.

Our first cache of the day was a large one – it was a ten-gallon bucket! Lots of neat stuff in there! It was not quite six miles from home.  I’d originally planned on this one to be later in the day, until I read that there were several travel bugs residing in that bucket, just waiting to be carried away to new adventures! Since we had a LONG day planned of wandering far & wide, this was a MUST.  🙂 We found the cache easily (kinda hard to miss, hehe!) and left with three travel bugs (and of course, we left other trinkets in their place).

Next stop on the list: Rutledge, Georgia! Had never heard of the place before today, but put the coordinates in the GPS, and away we went! This was one of a series of Historical Georgia Multi-Caches, and the first multi-cache we’d ever attempted.  The idea is that you go to the published coordinates, then look for clues listed in the cache description (in  these cases, the clues were the various years of certain events) to figure out the coordinates of the actual cache location.  I can’t say, of course, where this first one (or any of them, really) took us, but I loved it! Now that I think about it, I wish we’d taken more time to explore that particular spot while we were there! *sigh* Oh well.

The next two caches were in or near Mansfield, GA – yes, another town I’d never heard of, LOL! Can’t describe these two, either, without giving away the final answers of the cache location. But, suffice it to say, Mansfield is another neat, neat little historical town.  Oh, and it’s also The Town Of Awesome BBQ!!!! Seriously. In between caches 2 and 3, we stopped for lunch at this tiny little hole-in-the-wall place, Where There’s Smoke BBQ. Definitely a bit of local flavor, both figuratively and literally. 😀  It. was. AWESOME! Both kids pronounced it to be the BEST LUNCH EVER in the history of the UNIVERSE! hehehe.  If you are ever geocaching or otherwise traveling thru or near Mansfield, EAT THERE! You totally won’t regret it. 😀

After our Mansfield stops, we wandered on a piece till we came to Bostwick, Georgia. (insert the “never-hear-of-it-before-till-now” sentence here!) This may well have been my favorite town of the day.  Absolutely quaint, oozing with history all over the place.  I absolutely adore old, historical buildings (my big goal in life is to live in a historical, antebellum home one day), and this was one neat little town. 🙂  The cache we were after almost didn’t get found… we found the location very, very easily, but were almost foiled by a “muggle” (non-geocacher) who was reading her newspaper literally right on top of the geocache. Like, literally, right on top of it. *rolling eyes*  We wandered around the area some, kinda hoping that the presence of small kids would kinda disrupt the wonderfully serene atmosphere she was enjoying.  No such luck.  We went back to the van, where I called hubby to check in with him.  As I hung up the phone, poof! Muggle-lady got up and left!!!!! Just like that.  Good thing I’d paused to call hubby… otherwise, we would have left and chalked it up to a disappointing “did not find.”  We jumped out of the van and ran over to the place it was hiding, where my daughter found it in no time flat! The hint in the cache description told us exactly where it was, LOL, so we didn’t even need GPS for this one. Sign, re-hide, and back to the van we went….just as Ms. Muggle was returning from wherever she disappeared to. Seriously???? On a 40-degree, windy day, it’s comfortable enough to sit outside and read a paper for a few hours??? Really? Okee dokee then…moving right along… 😉

We had just one more historical multi-cache on our list for the day in this general area.  However, the muggle-watching had eaten up some valuable time. It was now 3:30, and daylight would be fading fast before too long (by 6).  We were just a tad bit over an hour away from home, and there were two traditional ammo box caches we wanted to find near Loganville, our home town.  So, we nixed the last one (another one back in Rutledge – somehow I failed to group it together with the OTHER Rutledge ones… oh well!) and headed back towards the ‘Ville.

The next cache on our list…. was a Did Not Find.  It actually turned into a Did Not Attempt, because the GPS coordinates landed me in the middle of a residential neighborhood…and it was SUPPOSED to put me in a local park!  I’ve noticed that with any Tribble Mill Park cache I’ve tried to find, the coordinates always put me in one of the nearby swanky neighborhoods.  :::facepalm::: I know when I land in a neighborhood,  I need to just tell my GPS to find Tribble Mill Park and go from there, haha. (I do not know ahead of time WHAT park I’m going to…just that it’s “a” park… and any neighborhood I land in has always been very close to Tribble Mill, so… I’m sensing a theme here, LOL.)  By this time, it was  closing in on 5:00.   Tribble Mill is a pretty big park (love love LOVE it there!) and I didn’t feel like there was enough daylight left to safely start wandering thru to find this cache.

There was ONE more in our list of caches we wanted to find, but that one didn’t work out either…my car GPS put me not quite where it should have,and with it being so late, I didn’t want to risk wandering around any longer than I had to.  So, the GeoKidz and I called it a day and headed home.

All in all, it was a solid, full day of geocaching – over 100 miles, round trip.  We found all the ones we actually looked for, and weeded out three that there just wasn’t time for.  If this was warmer weather, we would have left much earlier in the day and been able to find one or two more..but I wanted to wait till the roads started to thaw out a bit before we left home.  😀  Most of the ice is gone, but there are still icy patches and black ice scattered about.  I figured a later start would be the smarter idea.  Goal: 8. Found: 5. Of the three travel bugs we picked up in the morning, we found new homes for two of them along the way.  One remains in my care until I can sneak out and send him back on his journey. 😉 I’d call that a pretty successful day of hunting!

Dinner at a local restaurant (Claude’s Off the Bayou – YUM!) and a quick trip to Kroger to get some groceries finished up our long, fun day. 😀 😀

Hope everyone enjoys the rest of their weekend!

Cache Dash at the Georgia Geocacher’s Association Meeting

Happy Sunday evening, everyone! Greetings from my home office here in Loganville, where I sit and wait for the first Snowpocalypse of 2011 to arrive.  Already, schools are shutting down, the attorney I work for went into the office today and took a slew of work home with her, just in case, and you could get rich by auctioning off a loaf of bread or jug of milk, as the grocery stores are madhouses of panicked stampedes and nearly-empty shelves. Yep.  We just might get one to three inches.  Maybe.  If you live in the mountains, well, then, you might get up to six inches. A single flake, or the thought of a single flake (of the snow variety) is enough to create widespread panic here in good ole Georgia, hehe.   Of course, the real danger is in the icy roads that accompany or follow snow.  Down here, snow doesn’t often stick… it lands, melts, and then, when temps drop overnight, freeze to a lovely but deadly sheet of slick, black ice.  And chaos ensues.

As I sit here, I am also wondering if it’s worth the effort to hobble alll the way into the other room waaaaayyyy over there to get more Advil for my wimpishly sore muscles.  Yesterday, the GeoTeens and I drove down to Callaway Gardens for the January meeting of the Georgia Geocacher’s Association (of which I am now a full-fledged member – yay!).  Of course, directionally-challenged as I am, we ended up spending about 30 minutes or so LOST, driving around in the wrong part of Callaway Gardens… I’d gone in the wrong entrance and circled the cottages for what seemed to be forever, lol.  (Hey, I told you at the beginning I’m highly geographically challenged! I was so not kidding, nor exaggerating! haha!) Eventually, we landed in the right place, got signed in, got some coffee, and went outside to participate in the Cache Dash.

The Cache Dash was a four-mile hike through the Gardens, with a list of  coordinates for six different caches we had to find along the way.  There were also bonus objects we had to be on the lookout for.  Whoever had the lowest score at the end (time it took to complete the course, minus the bonus points you accumulated) was the winner.  Well, we definitely did not win, LOL! I was more worried about the whole “finding caches and not getting lost” part of it all, and had completely overlooked the (obvious) fact that this was, in essence, a race.

The last time I did any distance walking and/or jogging was probably close to three months ago now…when you factor in work, the lingering bronchitis/cough, etc… this was the first time I’ve been out exercising in a long time.  I had thought to myself, “well, it wasn’t long ago when I was doing 8 and 10 miles walks – 4 should be a breeze!” Um, yeah, I was soooo dead wrong about that!  haha!  They kindly paired us up with another, more experienced couple… um, a SUPER-FAST, more-experienced couple.  I was going top speed for me (which isn’t very fast, even though I was giving it 100% lol) and still was BARELY able to keep pace with them.  I’m pretty sure they would have won and/or done much better if not for pokey old me. Sorry, team mates!!!!

Anyway, the cache dash itself was AWESOME! I actually found the first cache (yay!).  Which was good, because that was the only one I found the whole time, hehe. Usually the other couple had it found and were signing the log by the time I managed to catch up with them (cringing in shame, again).  Boy, was it an adventure! Over the river (ok, really a lake/creek) and thru the woods, down a steep hill, over dead trees, under branches, thru vines, up hills (and those of you who follow my jogging/running exploits know how much I LOVE hills… they are in the same category as early mornings and Mondays, hehe!).  Even so, I was having too much fun to let a hill or two dampen the moment. 🙂 Callaway Gardens is BEAUTIFUL! It wasn’t the leisurely stroll I’d thought it would be, but we still saw plenty of scenery.  It was a picture-perfect day, too – not a cloud in the sky, temps in the 40s – a crisp, clear, PERFECT day for caching or anything else.  My son brought his Nintendo DSi with him and used that to take pics.  If we can ever figure out how to upload them to the computer, I’ll post some for you. 🙂 If we accidentally delete them in the process, then, well, sorry. ha!

My favorite cache of the day was actually the last one.  It seemed to take us forever to find the durn thing.  I stood at the edge of a very dense thicket of trees and bushes and vines and stuff, and my GPS said I was within 3 feet of the cache. (I should note here that every other cache had been your traditional regular-sized ammo box type, so of course, we were thinking this would be too.)  But, we couldn’t find it. I was stabbing the ground with my walking stick, listening for the hollow thunk-thunk that would tell me I hit an ammo box or other container.  The other couple was doing the same thing.  I tried to lean in as far as I could to the thicket, but didn’t get very far.  Finally, my 15 year old GeoTeen, Jacob, said, “I’m going in!” I handed over the GPS and my walking stick, and he fought his way thru.  We were yelling directions, “Come over this way more!” and he’d say, “What way??? I can’t see you!” Of course, we couldn’t see him, either… that thicket was THICK.  He’d fought his way about two-thirds through it when one of the other folks had the proverbial light bulb go off in her mind. 🙂 Something about the cache name made her think it might be hidden in some kind of hollowed out log or something.   And, indeed it was!  Worse yet, it was RIGHT THERE in front of us the whole time. We’d been over it, on it, around it, heck, I’d even leaned over it multiple times, trying to tap the ground on the other side of it! :::facepalm:::  Her hubby reached in that log, found the green tubular cannister, and there ya go – mystery solved!  Of course, at this point, my poor son was still stuck in the middle of that durn thicket and had to fight his way back out again, hehe.  Poor lilll fella!

Another memorable moment is while we were looking for this last cache, a lady walked by on the path with her pet…. vulture.   Yep, pet vulture.  We have photographic evidence!  He was very curious about what we were doing – walked over to our area and chattered at us as we were searching.  At first I thought it was a turkey, but turkey’s aren’t 100% black feathered, and he didn’t have a comb thingy or a gobbler thingy on his beak/head.  Then I thought it was a really big crow, until I realized that they don’t make crows THAT big, haha.  The lady told us it was a vulture.  She called him and he waddled back over to her, and ate some treats from her hand, haha.

We then raced back to the starting point (and yes, I actually did RUN the last little bit there!) and finished the course.  While I have great memories of the whole day and had a blast, the memories that stand out most are that last cache that was hidden in plain sight, my poor son stuck in the thicket, and the pet vulture, hehe.  It was great!

And now you know why I’m eating Advil like it was candy, haha, and am soooo sore EVERYEWHERE! My ARMS are even sore because of the reaching/climbing/leaning on my walking stick, haha.  We escaped relatively unscathed.  I fell twice during our adventure – once on a tree root in the path, and once on a vine that sneakily wrapped itself around my boot.  No harm done, I fall all the time and am used to it. 😉 My  GeoTeen daughter (17) did find one ginormous hole that was covered up in leaves.  It LOOKED like solid ground, till stepped into it and it swallowed her up to her thigh!  She escaped the hole and kept on for the rest of the hike.  Once she stopped moving after it was all over though, and the adrenaline faded out, her ankle started hurting her and still hurts today.  She probably has a bit of a sprain, but it’s not anything too severe.  A nice little ankle brace is doing the trick and she’ll be OK.  My son never fell (I think he was the only one of our group who didn’t at some point!) but he forgot to wear his knee braces yesterday, and his tendinitis is bugging him today.  Needless to say, he’s got his knee braces on now!

Anyway, after the cache dash was over, we enjoyed a big bowl of super-yummy chili and watched a presentation on solving puzzle caches. I haven’t attempted a puzzle cache yet (never been much of a puzzle person to begin with) but will one of these days.  Some of those puzzles are positively evil, LOL!!!!

After the meeting was over, the GeoTeens and I piled back in the van for our 2 & 1/2 hour ride back to Loganville (with a stop at a Walgreens along the way for some Epsom salts, some IcyHot, and a few other things).  When we got back to Loganville at about 6:30 p.m., we stopped by the local Chinese food place and picked up dinner for hubby and the two little GeoKids waiting at home (and dinner for us, too!).

After dinner and the very best hot shower I’ve ever had, I completely crashed into an exhausted heap and slept like a rock. 🙂

Thank you to all who made the Cache Dash and GGA meeting so awesome!!! I’m so glad we went and am looking forward to participating in more events in the future.  🙂

Now, where’s that Advil….?