I took the long (for normal people) drive up to L-Town to see the girls this weekend. Unfortunately, there was no county action, but that doesn’t mean caching wasn’t done. I needed my daily cache, and where better to find one than in a fresher hunting ground than usual? Since my younger daughter is the newest cacher, I tasked her with choosing our cache and taking point on finding it. She chose one based on its troll-related name. As you can imagine, it turned out to be under a bridge. The hider’s name was fairly distinctive for the area. As fate would have it, my daughter knew the CO’s sister. A couple of texts back and forth confirmed that the dog in the CO’s profile photo was, in fact, the friend’s family dog and that the friend’s brother is a cacher. Knowing we had an indirect line to the CO in case of trouble, we set off to snag our quarry. Our newest cacher was the one who found it. Based on the difficulty, I had assumed it would be a key box on the girders, but it turned out to be a tall, fat nano instead. Three signatures later, our work was done.
A little later in the day, we did something old and something new. My older daughter is working on getting her driver’s license, so I let her take us on a short drive today. Our drive ended at another cache. Many years ago, I found a trackable hotel in an unexpected location. Once my older daughter became a cacher, I took her out to it as an excuse to switch out some trackables. Today, she drove my younger daughter and me out to it so her sister could sign it just as we had. I again took the opportunity to switch out my three trackables for the three inside, but we had to take a figurative detour as we discovered that the cache was brimming with ants and larvae! I felt the need to do a little cleaning and figured that starting with some water to wash out the invaders would be a good start. Alas, I had already drunk all my water. My younger daughter went for her bottle, but it was also drained. In an unparalleled act of sacrifice, my older daughter gave of the water from her bottle. She even allowed some of the ice inside to spill out, losing a major portion of the cooling anima contained within. Truly, considering all she had given, she will no doubt be enshrined in the pantheon of the saintliest geocachers! As I flooded the insects away (neither of the girls wanted to get near them), the younger noted that the cache was for travel bugs, not real ones.
The ladies were in rare form. Nobody perished from dehydration.
Geocaching While Black 