I got out of bed, washed my face, put my clothes on and put some Cheerios in a bag. I saw their headlights come down the hill. I grabbed my coat and we headed off to Mike's house.
We drove down I-5 for about 2.5 hours. Part of the trip I fell asleep and it all made the difference of being really tired or being semi tired. We hit pockets of stop and go traffic when we crossed the border into Oregon, which was typical at anytime of the day. We talked about regretting our decision to go down I-5 and maybe going the other way though Longview/Hillsboro, turns out the stop and go was only minor.
It was weird driving this route again after so many years of not coming down here like I used to when I lived in McMinnville. I told them some stuff about some of the routes I took when I drove down here and the towns we passed. I've been to the museum once before while I lived in McMinnville. My mom and dad came down once and they wanted to go see the Spruce Goose.
We got to the Evergreen Aviation Museum at about 9ish. We parked the car and walked in. We weren't sure what we needed to do so we asked one of the people at the desk. She told us it was upstairs and we needed to pay our $20 to get into the museum before we could do it. We paid, got a wrist band and walked around the museum before we did the caching maze.
The Spruce Goose is insane! I've seen it before and had forgotten how big it really is. We took a few pictures and then walked upstairs to the maze. We really weren't sure what we were suppose to do so we read the directions. We were to take a postcard size paper with passport squares on it and take it to each of the rooms and put a stamp on it. While in each room you were suppose to look at the displays and information about GPS's, hiking, containers, satellites, maps, topography, where it all began, landmarks, etc. The information was pretty fun to read but we were experienced geocachers and this maze was for newbies. We wanted to see it and get the icon.
We were there for about an hour and then everyone got antsy and needed to go get caches in McMinnville. We walked down the stairs and into the gift shop. We browsed as people used the restroom before we left. Bev found a coin and since we were in Oregon, there wasn't any tax. She and I got one. When we got to the car, I took a pic of my coin and posted it onto the South Sound group. It was an instant hit and no one knew there was a coin in the gift shop when they visited. I turned it into a chain reaction. Some guy in our group made it a project of his to get coins for everyone who wanted one.
We left and started around town. Our goal was at least 30 in the amount of time we had left before it got dark. We started with the area around the museum and worked our way to the middle of town. It was kind of funny how things came back to me even though I've been away from this area since 2008. I knew where to go and what road to drive down to get to where the cache was. It made caching really easy and efficient. We grabbed about eight to ten around town and moved on to a park across the street. Only one was available. I told them we should head over to Linfield because there were about 14 in the area.
The ones at Linfield were tough with kids running around everywhere and two required us to climb on top of the structures to retrieve the cache. One of them was during class and the people inside could see us! Yikes. One of them was a webcam on campus was at the fountain. One more reason why I love smartphones. We could take it from our location live and it helped that the webcam was a live feed. While we were figuring it out, a student walked by and was very excited about what we were doing there. Almost like she knew what we were doing...possibly another cacher?
We moved on to the northwest of town. We hit up an area surrounded by lots of houses in a development and a walking trail in the middle of it. We started with the trail and was disappointed we could not find the one in the tree. Mike climbed up two of them hoping we would see and grab it. No luck.
Then there was this TB hotel I looked at about a year ago when I looked up this area. It looked awesome and it was.
We found about ten or so more around the housing development before we went to Discovery Park, a place Jessie and I have spent time in while I lived there. We were there about a half hour and grabbed three caches, the fourth one was disabled. We drove back towards town and grabbed others while we found another area to hit up. This was west of the college. We got about three of them and then went east to a woodchip trail along a fence. We were almost to 40 caches and it was getting dark. We found another housing development south of the college and met our quota. Then Jessie texted me that she was in town. I wasn't sure if Bob would stop by. She had a gift for me that she didn't want to send in the mail. I should have brought her present with me but I had no idea where it was.
We ate food at Wendy's before we left town. I asked Bob if we could go back into town and get the gift from Jessie. He said sure. Besides, we needed to waste some time before heading to the freeway or we would be stuck in horrible traffic. We got to her place and she was waiting for me by her porch. I had Bev come with me to take a picture. I haven't seen Jessie since June of 2011 at her birthday party in Portland.
We took pictures and we chatted for about 15 minutes about random things. I was nice seeing her in person instead of through Facebook and texting. I jumped back in the car and we were off to I-5. Mike had mentioned that he wanted to stop by a Target or a Best Buy. There was a Target in Sherwood we stopped at. I bought some popcorn. They didn't have what Mike was looking for so our next stop was the Tualatin Best Buy. He did not find it in there either.
The freeway was looking normal so we jumped on and headed north. We got home around 9ish.
Next adventure: 12.12.12 Event at Dirty Dave's.
No comments:
Post a Comment