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!

So… It’s Been A While…

It has been quite a while since I’ve written a blog post (mid-May, I believe).  Come to think of it, it’s been quite a while  since I’ve gone geocaching, which explains in part why I haven’t blogged much.  This is, after all, a blog about my (and the GeoKidz’)  favorite hobby.  🙂

But, life gets in the way sometimes.   Right now, our family is undergoing some pretty cataclysmic changes that are keeping us from our usual weekend geocaching adventures.  They are ultimately changes for the better, to be sure…but there’s still a lot of upheaval right now.  Beginning at the beginning, kinda….

Some of you may remember that in late May/early June, my Prodigal Son, GeoTeen2, went missing.  Not kidnapped or anything horrific like that, thank God… he just up & ran away.   He was gone a full seven days before he was caught.  A whole week.  One Hundred and Sixty-Eight Hours. Ten Thousand, Eighty Minutes… of not knowing where my kid was.  If he was safe.  If he was dead.  If he was hurt and in a coma somewhere.  If he was eating.  If he was getting in trouble.  If he fell into the wrong hands and was trapped in a nightmare.  If he was coming home.  If he was even in Georgia anymore.  If, if, if…. IF!  It was the longest, most exhausting, most horrific week of my entire life – all thirty-eight years of it so far.   I was playing phone tag with detectives.  Answering myriad questions. Asking even more.  Emailing as many of his Facebook friends as I could.  His sister was scouring through Loganville, finding as many of his friends as she could, searching for him, for some clue, ANY clue, as to where he was.  I even began to solicit local radio stations for help.  His siblings and I were terrified we’d never see him again.  Here’s a friendly tip for you to stow away in your memory:  If you are looking for your MIA teen, never, ever, EVER Google “what to do when your teen runs away”!  The statistics of runaways and what can happen to them are horrifying and will do nothing to contribute to your peace of mind.  

Yeah, so…that was a bad week.  Thank God they found him…thank God.  Safe and sound and in one piece.  The Loganville Police Department, and in particular Detective Massey, were absolutely out-freaking-standing during this time.  They worked hard to find him for me.  They were accessable, responsive,  patient with my dumb questions, my moments of panic, and my random, miscellaneous emails/calls/messages whenever I thought of any little thing, no matter how absurdly ridiculous or tiny, that maybe, just might help.   His little disappearing act got him another 30 days, but I’m OK with that… I know where he is and he can’t take off from there! 🙂  Ha! He’ll be home soon.   Speaking of home…

The biggest change of all.  The most difficult.  I hesitate to write of it. 

Our family is in the process of moving.  We are not moving far at all, just a little over six miles down the road, but move we must.  As a newly-single mom, I simply cannot afford the mortgage, the bills (especially the inside-the-city-limits water/sewage bills…OUCH!), and whatnot.  And even if I could…honestly, I think a change of location just might be good for us, especially a certain teenager. 

Now, don’t go thinking that you’re getting rid of us.  Oh no, not that easy!!!!! 🙂 We are not moving far at all.  Just far enough to where we will be in a somewhat rural area (with cows for neighbors…yay!) and different schools.  But not so far that we’ll have to change churches and babysitters and scout troops and whatnot.  Just enough change to be good for us, and just enough stays the same to give the kids some measure of stability in the midst of it all.   Loganville is still our hometown, and we are still firmly rooted in the community.  The big move happens within the next week or so, so this weekend is my last bit of free time to frantically scramble to get everything packed and ready to go.  I made progress last weekend, but still have a good bit to go. OK, most of it. haha.  Since I put the “pro” in procrastination and excel at the last-minute-freakout-to-get-everything-done, haha, I predict this will be a really productive weekend. 😀

I love where the kids and I are moving.  We are renting a 101-year-0ld farmhouse that just OOZES peace and tranquility…qualities we all very much need right now.  But I’m sad, too.  Deeply sad.  Leaving this house we live in is probably the hardest part of all.   When we bought it, I swore I’d live there for the rest of my life.   There’s an amazing story behind our home.  The community poured out SO MUCH LOVE and so much hard work to create this home for us.   So many did so much with a ton of love.  To walk away from that feels like a betrayal of everyone’s love and everyone’s hard work.   It feels like a slap in the face to those who poured themselves into the project.  It feels disresepctful.  It feels shameful…disgraceful. It feels like failure.  This isn’t how the story was supposed to end.  Nope, I was going to stay planted RIGHT THERE till the very end of my days…not because of the actual house itself so much, as the love that was poured into it on our behalf.

But…well, Life has a way of interrupting our plans.  This is not a decision I reached easily.  This is not even a decision I want to make.  But… when all is said and done, I’ve got to do what is best for my family.  My kids and their well-being come first.  Period.  We need to live in a more affordable home in a more affordable area.  We need a fresh start in so many ways.  When it comes right down to it…. We’ve got to move.  Just no other way around it.   So… move we shall.

So, that’s why there have been no blog posts about quirky adventures and random travels as we hunt down cleverly-hidden geocaches all over Georgia.  There’s just been no time.  Our world has collapsed, shattered, and imploded.  Picking up the pieces and rebuilding a whole new world is a full-time job, and then some. 

But once we’re all moved and settled in, you better believe that the GeoKidz and I will be back out there, hunting for our hidden treasures…using a billion-dollar satellite system to find Tupperware hidden in the woods, having zany adventures along the way.

There are lots of geocaches in the area to which we are moving.

I’ve already checked.  🙂

 

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!

A Caching Quickie

FINALLY, I have broken my long streak of being cooped up indoors and not being able to breathe semi-fresh air (this IS Atlanta, after all…full of pollen and polutants, but hey, allow me my delusion for a moment, ‘k? 😉 )! 

Since our family has to wake up SO freakin’ early in the mornings (and I am not by nature a morning person…I’m a night person, which is good because I like to hang out with these folks a lot, haha! Always gotta be hunting something, I guess! 😀 LOL!), usually by the time I get home I’m exhausted and ready to crumple into an incoherent heap.  And usually, that’s pretty much what I do – dinner, kids’ baths, homework, and then…CRASH!

But last night, I’d had ENOUGH of being cooped up!!! Enough, I say! Traffic was uncharacteristically kind to me, and I arrived at the GeoKids’ daycare a few minutes – like three – before 6:00 – something that almost NEVER happens, though I leave my office at 4:30 on the dot.   Took them home, coerced my teen into browning some ground beef for me so I could get a head start on sphaghetti for dinner, and then essentially turned right around and took GeoTeen1 to youth group.  Home less than 45 minutes, but that’s much longer than we are usually home several nights a week, LOL!

I figured that we had just enough daylight for me and the GeoKids to find a couple of the nearby local caches.  And by local, I mean a mile or less from our house! #winning! 😉 I didn’t bother to change clothes from work because (a) I hadn’t really had time, and (b) from the descriptions, I figured both were in nice, well-paved areas that would not necessitate crawling thru thickets or slogging thru mud. OK, well, I was half right! 😉

Our first didn’t even require our car GPS to figure out where the general location was… it was the “Downtown/Main Street USA – Loganville” cache.  Main Street isn’t particularly huge, and if you are going for smack-dab center of the street/nifty historical value, there’s pretty much only one spot real good for that. 🙂 However, that said, it took a little longer than I expected to find it, haha… Had to search pretty methodically before I found the thing. I was a little nervous, as I couldn’t really see where I was sticking my hands…there was a wasp sleeping on the flagpole next to us, and the whole time I kept thinking, “Oh PLEASE don’t let there be a bees’ nest hiding in here anywhere!” Ha! (Note to self: add gloves to cache supply bag asap….!)  GeoKid1 was in charge of the camera and was snapping pics right & left (most of which came out blurry, as you’ll see, but it’s all good!). Finally found the cache, signed the log, and away we went to cache number two!

 

After we conqured this one, we moved on to the next… it was the “Silver Bullet #4” geocache.   The hint made me think it was located in a similar urban/commercial-type area that would be a breeze to get to.

Yeah, not so much.  More like an area of future development that has not reached the paving stage yet.  And if you live in GA, you know that for a week solid, we’ve had nothing but heavy downpours and thundrstorms. Fun time! Yay! Slogging thru mud in dress shoes! (They are brand new, but thankfully only paid like $3 for them at thrift store so I wasn’t overly freaked out. 🙂 ).  Fortunately, much of the ground was firm-packed earth/fine gravel-like stuff so it wasn’t TOO bad… only had to slog thru one truly oozy and icky area briefly. The kids, of course, LOVED it! Jump! Splash! Splat! Ooze! Fun times. 🙂

GeoKid2 found it in no time flat. I had a pretty good idea, based on the description, of exactly what we were looking for. He made a beeline for it once we saw it (not saying what “it” is so as not to spoil the fun for others!) and sure enough, the cache was hanging out right where I thought it would be. 🙂

We finished finding our geocaches by 7:45, then traveled the .06 mile back home to finish making dinner before having to pick up GeoTeen1 from youth group.

All in all, it was a super-quick cache run that provided a nice diversion to our typical weeknight drugery and gave us all a much-needed shot of Kid Fun for the day. 🙂

Thanking God we’ve made it to Thursday… one more day, and the weekend is here! Woot! Have a good one, folks!

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!

 

My Weekend Quest

Yay, it is FINALLY Friday! Thank You, God! 😀 Yesterday was my birthday (I’m old now, 38 – LOL!) and it was a good one.  Thanks to Facebook, I received well over 100 birthday greetings which made me feel all loved & stuff. 🙂 Then, one of my attorneys I work for (and three paralegals) took me to lunch at the new restaraunt in our building.  It was delicious!!!! In fact, I was so stuffed, I didn’t even eat dinner last night… yummy! After I picked up the kids from daycare, I treated myself to not cooking – got them happy meals instead, LOL!We got their Valentine’s cards done for the class parties they are having today, they did their homework, got their baths, etc… I was able to have some actual PEACE AND QUIET, got some reading done, some prayers prayed,  and by 9:30-ish I was snoozing away peacefully.  Nothing like falling asleep early, which almost never happens!  It was fantastic.  So, thanks to everyone for making my birthday great!

When scoping out my weekend, I initially thought that any Geocaching would happen on Saturday only. And Saturday afternoon, at that.  Saturday morning, I have to meet some ladies for a Bible Study group I’m considering joining. After that, I have to run to Snap Fitness to sign my membership agreement and get The Tour.  I am only going to be a member for the next two months or so (not something I can afford long-term) until I get thru this half-marathon I’ve signed up for.  Those of you who have known me for a while know I signed up to do a half-marathon with the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training program, to help raise $$$ for cancer research and to help families who are currently in the fight.  Well, weather and illness (three+ months of bronchitis) have conspired against me, along with my hectic schedule & commute.  The only way I’m gonna be able to get the rest of my training done is if I have access to a treadmill.   Santa brought me a GPS, not a treadmill (yay for GPS, it was alos on my list, so I’m happy!) so I had to come up with Plan B.  My birthday gift to myself was the month-to-month membership at Snap (which is right across the street from me) so I could finish this dang half-marathon.  It’s been a long fight – last time I signed up, I got bronchitis FIVE DAYS before the event. Five. Days. I was sooooo upset! So… trying this again and won’t quit this time.  If I get sick or hurt or sick again right before the event… I’ll be really REALLY mad! LOL.

Anyway, I figured after the fitness center tour, it would be about 1 or 1:30 – still have enough daylight left for 4-5 hours of local caching. Probably won’t go that long, because I have a whole heap of laundry to do…but at least the GeoKids and I can get some caching done. 🙂 After two weeks, I’m going stir crazy. 🙂

Sunday, my GeoTeen1 (the girl) are going to visit GeoTeen2 (the boy, currently on “forced vacation” in Gainesville).  We’ll have to go to the early service at church (8:45 – ugh! GeoTeen1 said she didn’t think they even made an 8:45 on the clock during weekends –  LOL!) to get to Gainesville by 1:00.  Only two can visit him at any time, so it will be me and her, while hubby stays home wiht the little GeoKids.  I originally figured that, givin the 1:00-2:30 visiting hours, and the fact that it’s a 90-minute drive from home to there, it would be a geocache-free Sunday. (sad!)  Then it dawned on me… Hey! They have Geocaches in and near Gainesville, too! Duh.  So I put in the address of where we’d be, and voila! Several caches popped up.  There didn’t seem to be any that were particularly inspiring… until I found THIS ONE.  The code for this one, if you are looking it up on the Geocaching webiste, is GC2EBQ3.  In case that link doesn’t work, here is a picture from the photo album on that cache page:

Yes, this cache is located deep in the heart of a bamboo forrest!!!!!!! Ginormously tall bamboo, tall as trees! Super-thick forrest!  Trails, nature, and did I mention, ginormously tall bamboo everywhere?! HOW FREAKIN’ COOL IS THAT?????!!!!????? Hopefully I get an early Valentine’s day gift of a digital camera (our old one died… I’d also accept an iPhone now that Verizon has them, LOL… but iPhone costs more dollars than we have in the bank, so that’s pure wishful thinking there, LOL!) so I can take pics of this… it is sure to be fantastically awesome!

So, I am excited to finally be able to get out there and get some geocaching done on Saturday… but I am far, far, FAR more excited about the one on Sunday, smack-dab in the middle of a whole mess of bamboo! That will be mega, mega cool!!!!

Will let y’all know how it all goes…keep your fingers crossed for me & GeoTeen1 that we can find the bamboo forrest one! Will post pics if I can. 🙂

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!

FINALLY Escaped!!!!!

At long last, the temperature climbed high enough above the freezing mark to thaw out most of the ice on the roads…. THANK GOD! (Which I mean quite literally, btw!) As I mentioned earlier, I did not go to work today.  A large part of the reason was that I was simply too traumatized by my commute from the ice-induced 7th level of Hell yesterday…. horrible nightmare, that.  3.25 hours TO work, then work for three hours, then over 3.5 hours HOME.  Seriously. I was really ready to go postal by the time I got home, haha.  Fortunately, today my two oldest kids, the GeoTeens, were leaving for a church youth retreat at 1:00, leaving me babysitterless for the day.  One day of  full daycare would cost almost as much as a whole week of before & after care; the lady we usually use as a backup is in a neighborhood full of twists and turns and hills and such along the route from here to there (refer to the aforementioned state of traumatized-ness resulting from my commute yesterday).   None of my attorneys were planning on being in the office anyway, so I used up a vacation day with their blessing. 🙂 Have I mentioned, I (heart) the attorneys I work for?? They are awesome! 🙂

After dropping the GeoTeens off at church, the GeoKidz and I returned home.  By this time, the ice on the roads was vanishing fast, and I finally felt safe enough to venture out on a quick cache hunt. 🙂 I fiddled around with Geocaching.com and my GPS, and figured out how to download “Pocket Queries” to my GPS, and upload my log entries to Geocaching.com. 😀 Major accomplishment for techno-challenged me! 😉  I then planned out a route of four or five local caches we would attempt to find.  We found three.

The first cache was a simple lamp-post skirt hide.  The GeoKidz had not been with me when I found previous lamp-post caches; they were fascinated with the idea that the square box part of the lamp-post actually can be MOVED and lifted up! Who knew, right?! 😉

From there, we wandered to a local park, one I’ve been to many times (it’s actually one of my most favorite places to go jogging, because the track around the football field is nice and FLAT!).  This one required that we veer off the paved path and wander in the woods for a short while.  Obviously, this one was much more challenging than the lamp-post find!  While the snow was mostly gone from the roads and such, there was still a TON of it on grassy areas and… in the woods.  No traffic (car or foot traffic) to help speed along the melting.  This meant that everything pretty much looked exactly alike. My GPS sometimes gets a little iffy if there is heavy tree cover.blocking its signal.  I’m still learning how to read and interpret its various moods and such, haha.  We spent a good bit of time wandering around, poking at the ground with sticks.  About a thousand times, my kids were POSITIVE they’d found it… only to discover that they had, in fact, found a perfectly wonderful tree root/stump/rock/miscellaneous pile of leaves.  Eventually, I found it purely and completely by accident.  Yay! 🙂 This was definitely the most accidental find I’ve had so far, though, haha! We signed the logbook and deposited some swag trinkets and a GeoCoin before heading on our way.

Our next stop was supposed to be one near a local bowling alley. I’ve wanted to find this one forever (like, all three or four weeks I’ve been geocaching! Seriously, forever! haha). This one was foiled by a good amount of ice that made the area it was hidden in dangerous… that, and a muggle (a/k/a, “non-geocacher who has no idea what we are doing”) who was watching us intently, and then got on his cell phone while watching us intently.  Although geocaches are only placed somewhere with express permission from the property owner, I still didn’t feel like having my first possible encounter with the police thinking I was behaving suspiciously, haha.  So, the GeoKidz and I left there, and marked that one as one to return to when the ice has vanished. 🙂

By this time, the day was winding down, and daylight would be fading fast soon.  I nixed the other cache or two I’d had on my list, and chose instead another lamp-post skirt hide to find, just to end the day on a positive note.  We drove, we lifted, we signed, we replaced, we left. 😉

We finally arrived home shortly after 5:00. I ordered pizza and began plotting our adventures for tomorrow.  Hubby has to work all day, followed by him attending the Falcons’ first playoff game (unless he found someone to buy his ticket…he wants to trade up his Christmas gift (the ticket) for a nicer TV for our room. Go figure, LOL!).  The GeoTeens are not home until Sunday afternoon, and thus the GeoKidz and I are free to wander as we please for the whole day. 🙂

We are going to start off with a large cache about six miles from us.  It has several travel bugs residing in it.  The plan is to grab a few travel bugs, then begin our wandering.  There is a series of historical multi-caches that a local guy has put together that I’ve been just dying to go find. I adore history (with my Greatx3 Grandfather having fought in the Civil War for the 34th GA Infantryand my ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War for the Americans… both were POWs, both were wounded in war, both survived and lived happily ever after, how can I not love history??? It’s in my blood, literally! Yep, history is COOL!) Anyway, I’ve selected a few caches to get started on that are a bit of a drive from where we live.  I figure we’ll find a few of those, then work our way back towards Loganville.  This will be the first time I’ve attempted a multi-cache.  With a multi-cache, you are given the coordinates to the first stage of the cache.  The actual cache itself is not there, but there are clues there to help you figure out the coordinates to where the cache itself is. 🙂 So you go to stage one, then on to stage two (or three or however many there are).  The ones I picked are simple two-stage caches that hopefully will not drive me TOO crazy! I need to find at least one of the critters to make the drive worth it. 😉 We aren’t wandering horribly far, closer than I commute to work, but so far we haven’t been farther than six miles or so… so this counts as “adventure” in my book! Plus, I’ve never been to these particular areas before, so that definitely counts as “adventure!”

I’m sure there’s no way we’ll actually find ALL the ones I picked out for tomorrow (8 or 9 of them), but it’s at least a rough plan to go by.  The adventure is in the journey and the wandering, not in the checking off things on a list. 🙂 We’ll find what we can, and attack the rest another day.

And now I must sign off and do those much more mundane, less fun things like trying to straighten up this catastrophe of a house, and convince hyper GeoKids that bath and bed times are really NOT the End of the Universe As We Know It. 😉

Happy Friday all! May your weekend be a stupendously fabulous one!

 

 

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….?