Poor Baby!

Our Golden Retriever is sick! She has been sick for over a month. In fact, she has been sick since a couple of days after we returned from a trip that included a bumpy ride along the route of the 2007 GBES Rally (see story below) and a journey to Utah and Wyoming! She has been bed ridden in the garage since we discovered transmission fluid all over the garage floor!

Today was the first day she was able to venture out. Unfortunately, she needed help and we had to call on AAA to get her to the doctor! The doctor has not been available until now because of an important jeep jamboree during the month of July. I guess it is a good thing we didn't want to participate in this jamboree!

















We called AAA at 6:30 this morning. The tow truck arrived about 6:45. Wow--that was fast! We were impressed! I hopped behind the wheel of the Golden Retriever, turned the key ( not far enough to start), released the brake and put her in neutral.

Larry and the tow truck driver pushed her out of the garage while I steered her backwards onto the street. Then they moved to the rear and we guided her to the edge of the tow truck platform. The driver attached the tow chain and slowly inched her up on to the truck! It was a heart wrenching moment!

By now we had attracted a couple of the neighbors and we had to withstand the usual ribbing. It was a rough moment!

Larry signed all the "admission forms" and made arrangements to meet the driver and our Golden Retriever at Extreme Gear. We jumped in our Sequoia and followed our jeep down the road. We were sad, but we finally experienced something we had never experienced before. Instead of following GeoJeep down the road, we were following our very own Golden Retriever. Talk about a change of scenery!

We arrived at the jeep hospital and Larry backed GR down the ramp and into a parking space--sort of. He misjudged the arc of the curve at the end of the ramp and ended up a little "cattywompused" in the parking space. Oh well, that is the way she was going to have to stay!

She is still at the doctors. We aren't sure how long she will remain there. Hopefully, not too long! We may lose a few arms and legs to get her out, but she is worth it as she has taken us on many fine adventures! In the meantime, we will continue to do some urban caching and save the more adventuresome caches for sometime in the future!

I wish we had pictures!

Ann(imawahl), Larry, and I went geocaching on Sunday. It was quite a day, but we didn't get any pictures!

We started the day on our bikes. We met up with Ann's bike group (including 2 brand new geocachers) and rode to Woodcreek Oaks Golf Course for breakfast. The bike ride was over 12 miles and Ann and the other new cachers found a couple of caches both coming and going! We were pretty worn out by the time we got home!

But, the day did not end there. A new geocache had been released that morning and the owner just happened to be DStoye (a friend of ours). Naturally, we had to make the effort!

The cache (Don's Revenge) was described as an evil cache. Trust me, the word evil does not describe this cache! There were a total of 5 stages but we must have found several decoys along the way! Each stage was more devious than the last! At one point, we were prepared to give-up, but we chose to call Don for a hint. It turned out that the coordinates we had found at one of the stages were incorrect! He provided us with the correct information (and fixed the problem for other cachers) and we were off to the next stage.

I will avoid any specific hints on the different stages, but consider the various activities we performed to get to the final stage and the all important cache! We waded through a creek (Ann did this one), climbed a wall, walked through stickers, made a couple of round trips, crawled under bridges (felt like the military drill where you climb under things on your stomach and then switch to your back), reached in questionable places, battled spiderwebs, solved puzzles, tried to use x-ray vision (didn't work), wished we had more water to drink, out maneuvered some other geocachers, and touched who knows what! Of course, not all of this was necessary, but most of it was!!!

Just in case you were wondering, it took over 4 hours for us to find all the stages of Don's Revenge! We were pretty exhausted when we finished. We were anxious to head home for showers, but first we had to go to Starbucks to celebrate. We were the first people to find it and the prize was a Starbucks gift card! I'm not sure the people at Starbucks were excited to see us--we were pretty dirty--but we didn't care! Our frappuccinos were mighty tasty!

Some people would think we were weird! Some people would think we had actually lost our minds! Some people would just shake their heads and pretend they didn't know us. But if we get a nod and a smile from you, then we know.... We know you are as obsessed as we are and will be going for this cache sometime soon!

We had quite an adventure during those 4+ hours and we really loved it. I just wish we had pictures!

We Made It To Wyoming!

But wait! Wasn’t our destination Tremonton, Utah? It certainly was, and we got there but we just couldn't resist the temptation. We arrived in Tremonton on Monday after a lengthy drive (including geocaching) from Reno. We spent a good part of our visit chatting with family. We did take a break occasionally to run to the store and pick up a few geocaches along the way. We justify the geocaching by claiming it is our exercise for the day.





Now it was the 4th of July and we thought we would see some of our country Larry and I had never seen before. We left everyone else behind and headed out across Northern Utah. We had a destination in mind, but we didn’t know if we would get there or not. We did! We made it all the way to Wyoming and found a total of three caches. One at the border but on the Utah side and two in Wyoming within 12 miles of the border.

To get there we followed The Behive State Hiway 30 from Tremonton, through Logan, through the Cache National Forest (interesting but we didn’t find a cache here), along Bear Lake, passed the town of Pickelville, passed the Redevous State Recreation area, through the Old Laketown Canyon, to the border and a little beyond! It was an interesting trip. We were obviously not in a pretty part of Wyoming (by our definition) when we got there but we saw signs directing us to follow this road to Jackson, WY and on to Yellowstone. We were tempted but given the distance and the fact that we were not prepared to extend our trip, we were able to ignore the temptation.

We had accomplished our goal for the day so we headed back to Tremonton. We debated taking the longer road leading back to Salt Lake, UT to make a bigger circle, but we figured we had abandoned the family long enough. It was time to get back in case we wanted to see the 4th of July parade in nearby Riverside.

Breaker! Breaker! We've Got Ourselves a Convoy!

We just spent the last weekend (June 30 & July 1, 2007) running the 2007 GBES Rally Route. We covered a lot of territory and all I can remember was that is was “way rocky”! Actually, the first day was the rockiest and we spent so much time bouncing around, I couldn’t do a thing with the computer except hold on to it! So, check out Geojeepers blog to get the more exciting version! The second day was a little easier but it was much hotter and there was less shade than the first day so we spent a fair amount of time in the sun finding caches.

We started the first day at the parking lot at Albertsons in Carson City. We were joined by Geo-Jeeper (Cynthia & Mike), our illustrious leaders, and Geospyder (Jim & Marja), they had the middle spot, We brought up the rear. After filling up the cars with gas and ourselves with the traditional Starbucks, we headed out. It was 7:38 AM. It wasn’t too long before we picked up our first rally cache. Now we knew what we would be looking for at each stop for the remainder of the day. It was a piece of pvc pipe with caps at both ends with a piece of paper (log) inside. Sort of sounds like a pipe bomb. It sort of looked like a pipe bomb as well! Good thing we knew what it was! According to my pedometer, we took over 13000 steps during the day to find these caches. In reality, I think it was over 13000 bounces along the rocky roads.

During the day we saw some incredible views, drove down some pretty rocky and steep roads, enjoyed the company of our fellow travelers and hit 4300 caches. Geo-Jeeper hit a milestone of 4000 caches and Geospyder hit 1800 caches (he is the baby geocacher in the crowd). We were wishing for a champagne toast, but we settled for a beer at the restaurant at the end of the day. By the time we got home, we were all so tired we posted our finds for the day and were all in bed and asleep by 9:00PM. Guess we aren’t party animals any more!




For our second day, we again met in the Albertson’s parking lot. This time, Nevada Wolf (Teri) joined us. We had done most of the day rally caches yesterday and some of the night rally caches. Today we did the majority of the night rally and finished up with a couple of the day rally caches in Virginia City. It was fun for us because we had a change of scenery. Instead of GeoJeeps rear we saw the rears of two jeeps and a Toyota 4-Runner. We could tell exactly where the road would turn by watching the position of the three vehicles in front of us. Again, for the real story, check out Geojeepers blog. Mike said it so much better than I could at this point.

We ended the second day at Jim & Marja’s house for beer and pizza. We were all pretty exhausted so we enjoyed the rest before heading back to Cynthia & Mike’s house for a good nights sleep!

One of the things we like about geocaching is the people involved in this great “sport”. It is such fun to share your experiences with others and this was a great group--both days. It is also reassuring to know that if you get in trouble, others are there. We were on some very interesting roads and experienced some “hold your breath and pray” moments! We were glad the others were there!