We knew about the Kruise of Klamath, a several hundred classic car gathering in its 14th year, and planned our trip to be here just so we could see it. Today was the first big day of activities, through out today there were 4 mini Show & Shine events scattered around town that ran for 2 hours each. Tonight there is a Sock Hop at a downtown theater. We only visited the 8:00 to 10:00 one because we knew tomorrow we were going to the big one in a local park.
After the car thing we headed back into the hills south of downtown to do some more geocaching. We found five in a row, numbers 3 & 4 twice, and on the 6th were stymied. We walked a total of 4.2 miles in three separate loops, two of them overlapping.
On loop #1 we got to the first cache and realized we didn’t have a pen to write in the log book. Fortunately there was a pencil in the container. At cache #2 there also was a pencil. Number #3 had zero writing utensils. We headed over to cache #4 hoping it held something to write with, ideally it would have two, so we could take one with us. If it had just one we would borrow it, walk back to cache #3, sign that log and then return the writing thing back to #4. All that was for naught as the fourth container was too small to hold any kind of writing utensil. We contemplated just packing it in or driving the 3 miles one way back to the AirBnB. Then I remembered the Visit Klamath Info Center was right down the hill, 1/4 mile from the trail head, they’d have free pens.
As we pulled into the visitor center we saw a couple pop up tents right next door with a sign that said Gambler 500. After using the rest rooms and grabbing a few Visit Klamath pens we walked over to see what that was all about. Think 24 Hours of Lemons but off-road. You spend $500 on your race vehicle and get from Point A to Point B, 500 miles away, traveling on as few paved roads as possible. Looks like it is absolute insanity, so you know it is a blast. I didn’t think it would be wise to try and do it in the rental Chevy Malibu.
So we drove back up the hill to the trail head and went back to both cache 3 & 4 to sign the logs. From there we headed further into the park to look for more, but after one more cache and another quarter of a mile walk one-way, it was past noon and time for lunch. And we knew just where to get a free lunch. One of the Gambler 500 check points, Uglade Precision Driveshafts, was offering free hot dogs and hamburgers for participants and the public alike. We got to chat with company owners, several knuckleheads who were doing the Gambler and had lunch.
Being as it was still early afternoon and the sun was shining we decided to do a little more geocaching. This time we went to a different trail head for a couple of reasons, one was to find some caches and the second was because it would bring us near a cache we found on Tuesday that was a book cache. When we found it, Donna grabbed a book that she would read and then we could return it. Well, she read part of it, but couldn’t finish it so we wanted to put it back. After doing that we headed off to the next one, but after searching for about 10 minutes and having no luck we decided to go get some ice cream and call it a day.