Bicycling

Slept in a bit this morning and did a short bike ride, 10 miles total, ending up at Atlanta Bread Company for breakfast. A bagel each and a large OJ set me back $5 and some change. I swapped my last dollar for quarters so we could buy the Sunday Aiken paper, and because it was early with the sun behind some clouds, we ate our meal outdoors.

When we got home the weather wasn’t too bad (it was humid as all get out though) and we were already sweaty, I suggested we go out and grab the six caches we didn’t get yesterday. Donna was up for it, so we changed real quick and jumped in the car.

We had quite an assortment of styles of caches on the list too. If you look in the geocaching dictionary under bushwhacking, our first cache would be listed as a prime example. It is about 350 feet from the road and the only humans who have been in this patch of woods since the earth’s crust cooled are the 63 people who have found this cache and the 1 person who placed it there. Luckily it is just a bunch of dense underbrush and pine trees and not much in the way of thorny bushes. Finding the black painted mayonnaise jar was not too hard, but because I didn’t set a way point at the parking spot, the trip out was a little longer, and we came out of the woods about 50 yards away from the Emperor. The second was a short little 2 stage multi behind a hotel just a little further down the road. Number three was a mystery cache, you needed to solve a small crossword puzzle to come up the coordinates. I solved the puzzle last weekend and this weekend Donna found the cache. The fourth one on our loop was 5 feet into the trees at a short pullout on a busy high speed two lane road. The fifth was the very definition of one of my favorite geocaching phrases, “A 35mm film canister well integrated into the environment.” The sixth and last cache of the day was an ammo can next to a tree about 200′ off a back road which required traversing a long stretch of scrub grass, crossing a picket line of briars before entering a bit of woods.

The best story came from cache #5, called “Ice Ice, Baby” and here is how I logged it on geocaching.com:

Considering the name of the cache, as we approached in the geomobile I figured it was going to be something magnetic stuck to the ice machine outside. When I stopped in front of the establishment the GPSr said there was 165′ more to go. So much for that idea. I went inside to buy a cold drink and my wife went in search of the cache.

I walked inside and the proprietor was on the phone reading bible verses to someone (it was Sunday morning after all.) She said hello and I went to the drink coolers and pulled out Diet Sprite. As I headed towards the counter she started to wrap up her conversation, I stopped her from hanging up. I had opened my wallet up and noticed that it was empty, I forgot that I had spent the last 6 dollars earlier in the day at Atlanta Bread Company for our breakfast. She looked at me questionably when I told her not to hang up and I explained that I didn’t have any money and showed her the empty wallet. I started back towards the cooler with the drink, and she stopped me. She said, “Keep it. It’s hot outside, I can’t deny you a cold drink. It’s only a dollar, it’s not going to kill me and if it does, so be it.” I thanked her and left the store figuring my wife must have found the cache by then.

She was sitting on a retaining wall with a look that I recognized as defeat. I told her my story, we drank our cold Diet Sprite with gratitude and when we were finished, started the search anew. A couple minutes later she made the find.

Next Sunday at around the same time we plan on stopping back at that store and buying another cold Diet Sprite and paying two dollars for it.