I left the yard this morning with my freshly repaired truck. I can't help but wonder how long it will take before some dimwit hits it again.
I'm heading for a stop in Tulsa and then a stop just South of Houston. Nice little ride. I stopped in an IL rest area that was near a geocache. I donned my hat and vest, grabbed my gps, plugged in the cache data, and starting hiking into the woods to try and find it. Naturally I did it the hard way, hiking in a straight line through the nasty nettles and briars (wearing shorts of course), whacking through dozens and dozens of spider webs along the way. As I followed the gps I eventually intersected a path and knew that I could have avoided all of the leg scratches had I just taken a few extra moments to determine if there WAS a path heading that way. Oh well.
I followed the path as it was going in the general direction of the cache coordinates and eventually came to an area that was somewhat clear of nettles and briars and just had some large trees and some brush. The gps said I was at the location I was hunting. I started looking around. I won't give away exactly where the cache was located, but let's just say that it was extremely well disguised. Someone had gone to a lot of time and trouble to make this one not look like a cache, and their handywork was impressive.
As I was examining the cache's hiding spot trying to decide how one was supposed to open it a family, father, mother, three kids, came along. They were hunting the same cache. They seemed like nice folks and we chatted for a few minutes as we worked together to figure out the cache's secrets. We finally opened it only to find a combination lock. I was prepared for that as the cache page had mentioned checking out a landmark in the rest area and making a note of a year on it. That year was the combination. One opened cache.
I signed the log and retrieved a travel bug which I'll give a ride to another cache some place. It was a dickens of a cache and quite fun to find.