They finally started opening on Saturdays, so we took a little trip. Did a little caching along the way too.
So just posting to keep track of the top count.
Last Friday when we were having dinner out with friends discussion turned to the “Good Ol’ Days” of the MMC, say back about 9 or 10 years ago. We reminisced on old events and past members. One event that we did 2 years in a row and was deemed fun in the haze of foggy memories was a photo scavenger hunt. I had borrowed the idea from an Australian Miata Club and Americanized it. The Folks were divided into teams, given a disposable camera and tasks to complete of various levels that were worth points. Quest #3 in the first year was:
A picture of a Miata owner (and his/her car) that is not in the Miata Club:
100 points for a picture of them in their car.
Bonus 250 points if you get them to join the Club.
An additional bonus 500 points if you get them to join in the hunt and come to lunch with you.
One team managed just that feat. I kind of suspect that it really didn’t take too much to get Scott Rushton to be the 850 point man as his boss, the Sales Manager of the local Mercedes/Mazda dealer, was a member of the Green Team that brought him in. Scott sold me the Emperor and we lost touch a few years later when both he and his boss found themselves out of the car business when the dealership dropped the Mazda product line.
Donna and I have never clicked physically with the local Geocaching group, but we signed up in the beginning to their YahooGroups email list and still belong. Occasionally for what ever internal reason someone rubs someone else the wrong way starting a flame war with sides being taken. But it is mostly filled with congratulatory missives once anyone passes any kind find milestone that ends in two zeros (from hundreds to thousands.) The Saturday morning after that dinner I was reading the email digest of the previous day’s email when I spot a familiar looking email address, lowdollar99@xxxxx.com. Could it be who I’m thinking it is? So I scope out the user name on Geocaching.com and sure enough, it is Scott Rushton. How come I never noticed that before?
The day after he comes up in conversation about Miatas, I notice he is into geocaching too. Cue the Twilight Zone music.
Donna and I went back over to the bike/hike trail next to I-520 this morning. We had two more caches to hide, one was one that used to be in Hitchcock Woods before the Great Cache Purge of 2009 and the other probably would have found its way into the woods eventually (if it had remained a possibility.) We also had a Travel Bug we were going to drop into the cache we had placed yesterday.
We hid the first and then on our way to hide the second cache we walked by yesterday’s site and we could see 3 cars parked in the cul-de-sac near the cache. Our hide wasn’t yet published when we left the house this morning, but it must have been since because sure enough cachers were there. One couple had already found it and another was in the woods looking. We chatted a bit and even got nudge for the Gargoyle’s Crypt we missed yesterday. We hid cache#2 and went down and wasted 15 minutes looking and even with the hints couldn’t find it.
Remember yesterday I bent my glasses doing a small tumble when researching today’s possibly cache locations? No I didn’t fall again today, but I did break my temporary crown while eating lunch today. I have been chewing on the good side mostly, but sometimes I slip and chew over there. I didn’t just pull it off the post, but managed to bite down on it and break it into three pieces with the smallest one of never recovered…
We went out to do some geocaching this morning, back over on the new bike/hike trail along side the new section of I-520 that we covered part of last weekend. That section had 8 caches and this section had one until yesterday evening. The second was published late last night and this morning no one had logged it as found yet. With all the FTF Hounds around here we didn’t expect to be the first, we were sure someone already had and just hadn’t logged it yet. Didn’t matter one way or the other, we didn’t find it and no one has yet either…We did find the other cache though. We just didn’t have our geo-mojo working at all today and ended up with just three finds to go along with our three measly finds.
Now there are three caches on that section as part of our mission was to place a cache along that stretch of trail. It is out in the wild, just not published yet and like the rest of our hides it should be an easy find for folks. We think we are going to head out tomorrow morning and place a couple more out there. We scoped out a couple of likely spots. One of which we eliminated when on my way back down the embankment I slipped on the newly planted grass and did a slo-mo face plant at the bottom.
After giving up on the caching we stopped in downtown Augusta at the Greek Orthodox Church to have some lunch. We had bought a meal ticket last Monday when we ate at the local Greek place. The half chicken meal with sides was just the right size for us to split. On the way home we detoured through North Augusta to get some ice cream at the Pink Dipper, but all I had in my wallet was a buck, so we had to stop at an ATM. As I pulled to a stop at the bank I noticed that the Emperor’s odometer was sitting at exactly 107,000. In honor of that I tried to withdraw $107,000 from the ATM, but apparently that was above my daily withdrawal limit, because it only gave me $40.