After the Wenatchee Cache Machine: Leavenworth

The next morning I slept in. Derek got up about 8 and headed up stairs to hang out with Carl. I got up around 10 and it felt so good to sleep in. Derek came down stairs and we slowly started packing our stuff. We decided we wanted to find a few more caches in Wenatchee before we left. We got dressed and packed up everything in the car. We found For the Numbers first.



We found Rocks...What Rocks? in someone's front yard in a rock wall. We figured they had to be geocachers.



We took Carl to Between Bridges II a. and tried looking for Between Bridges II b. and could not find it because it wasn't there. We had to find one before we left Wenatchee, Ottima Cucina was under a lamp post skirt.



We decided to get gas from the 7-11 so we could make it to Leavenworth and home. When I think, see or hear of 7-11 my mind goes slurpees! I went in and got a cherry slurpee. We headed out west towards Leavenworth. I haven't been there in years. We mostly went for the webcam cache, Bavarian Village.



We are the three people in the lower right hand corner behind the camper.

We walked around town a little bit.





We found The Sneaky Bavarian Micro near some hotels. We met up with a few more geocachers and chatted for a bit.



Next we went down to Black Bird Island and found two, Black Bird Island and Der Cache 3. There was still snow on the ground in some places.







We walked down to Area 51 and tried looking for it. We couldn't find it anywhere. We moved on to Jennifer's Poem. We walked to the museum near the edge of the river and found the hard way down, haha. We got to the banks and found the plaque. We read the poem and glanced to our left and right out in the open was the cache. We signed it, put it back and admired the river.











We decided to head out. We walked back to the cars, chatted with Carl for a bit and got some food before leaving town towards 97. We went over the pass again and this time it wasn't snowing. Derek's mom called and we couldn't understand anything due to the spotting service. We got into Cle Elum and decided to find a few in Kittitas County. We stopped at Dairy Queen and used their WiFi to download caches that we didn't have. The one at the Mexican restaurant, Welcome to Hicktown, was thrown away by the owner because he didn't know what it was. We went for MP Ponds, under the freeway down a back road. We got to the location and there was a car sitting there. We guessed they're either lost or a geocacher. A woman and a little boy got out of the car. They were geocachers who had just recently gotten into it. We talked to them for a little bit. Found out they were from the Cle Elum area and they were going to Ocean Shores this next week.





We got back on the free way and wondered how many were on Snoqualmie Pass. There was too much snow to even attempt it. We moved onto Snoqualmie before it got dark. We rolled into North Bend and I have not been past the gas stations, fast food places or the outlet malls. I was curious what was beyond it. I really want to hike Mt. Si at some point, I found out where the trail head was. We got into the town of Snoqualmie and bam, lots of trains. I told Derek we'd come back after the falls to get a few pictures with the trains.





It was too hard to see the falls. It was too misty. I would probably come back in the summer to get a better view. We decided to find the cache across the bridge. We fumbled on the clue and went the completely wrong way. We got our bearings and found it at the end of the bridge near the parking lot.



I reminded Derek that it was getting dark quickly and if he wanted pictures of the train we'd have to go now. We left the falls and headed towards the trains. We parked in the parking lot and walked over. We found a huge log and we each took a picture with it. I found out later that log was a virtual cache, so glad I was curious and checked it out.





Derek got his picture with the train. He was excited about it.



We got back to Rainier around 9:00 and we stayed and chatted for a bit about the trip and the weekend. The next cache machine is June in Portland, Ore. I can't wait!

Derek is at 300 and I am at 436.

Wenatchee Cache Machine

This was our first cache machine. I got ready the night before and had everything all packed, at least I hoped so. I went to work and hoped for rain so our games would get rescheduled after being rescheduled from the 15th. We had already planned for it and I really didn't want to miss the games. I told the head coach about my dilemma and he was okay with it. I loaded my car before driving down to the game because Derek might have to come into Rainier. The first game went longer than I had hoped for. Derek ended up coming out. After the first game, I decided to miss the second and we packed up his car and off we went. He decided to stop by Subway and his apartment to pick up some more blankets. We got on the road and off we were to Wenatchee. The Dupont-Lakewood-Tacoma area had heavy traffic, but we knew that going into it. We were patient and let it work itself out. We got to Highway 18 and saw they were doing some work on the interchange. Finally! It’s so dangerous. We got onto I-90 and the rest of the way we just chatted about random things. It was getting dark as we hit US-97 over Blewett Pass. It rained, the rained turned into icy snow, then into fat flakes and then to rain again. We saw a SUV pulled over with a kid and his butt hanging out the door. Not sure what was going on there…

We pulled into Wenatchee around 9:30 p.m. We tried calling Carl but he didn’t answer. We pulled into a drive way we thought was his, it wasn’t. Good thing the person didn’t come out and yell at us. Carl finally answered his phone and told us where to go. We were close. We drove up to the driveway and we went into the living room and met everyone. We met Carl’s (we thought she was his girlfriend) friend, BreeAnna. She had a lot to say and share. He gave us the tour of the place. A while later we were all getting tired so we unloaded the car. We settled downstairs in his office/studio because we were out of the way and less noise from upstairs (his refrigerator needed some help). We got situated, used internet for a while and passed out. I was gone after a few minutes and didn’t hear anything until the alarm went off at 5:45 a.m.

We zombied out of bed, got dressed, grabbed the stuff we needed and headed out the door. We plugged in the coords to the first cache and headed on down. We sorta took the wrong exit, went over the bridge and ended up in Wenatchee instead of East Wenatchee. We turned around and went the other way and barely made it to the park n ride before everyone left. Derek got out and asked a group from Oregon what to do. They asked if we wanted to cache with them today and we said yeah, it would be fun. They’ve done four cache machines already and kinda knew what do to. They had the maps printed off and a good idea on what we were going to encounter the rest of the day. We exchanged names, geocaching names, where we were from, what we did and other random info throughout the day.

We weren’t sure how many we were going to find but we could find up to 120 if you did them all on the list. We didn’t know Wenatchee very well so that made it a little more difficult. We found 67 the first day. I am not going to list them all but some memorable ones from our adventure.

Rock On Down the Loop was a pretty cool one. It was placed on top of a tunnel on the Apple Capital Loop Trail, which is a 13 mile loop around the city from bridge to bridge. It was completed in 1994. It is one of the longest loops in Washington State. It is popular with bicyclists, walkers, joggers and in-line skaters. In winter months, cross country skiers and snowshoers share the trail.





We walked down to the nearest bridge and found Rock On. There were at least ten people looking for this one. I ended up finding it on top of the rock, hence the play on word. We found a couple more in the area before we went across the bridge into Wenatchee to find a bunch more.



We hit up a bunch of parks, a pretty popular spot to hide geocaches. This is one I found in a park, Wenatchee City.



We moved on to a residential area and found a really cool fence cap hide, My 1st Posting.



We ran around the community college and found four of them. I remember playing fastpitch against the Knights back in 2006, when I played for WSU. We beat them. We found our first sprinkler head cache and the cobblestone “castle” was pretty cool.





Then the route took us back into the downtown area. Non Rolling Log was our next find. It brought us to the library. We used the bathroom and then found the cache. It was in the library under the reference section. I thought no one could hide a cache indoors. I found out you actually can as long as you have permission and it’s open to the public. That was my first indoor find.



We saw a lot of sculptures along the way. This was one of many, Watch By The Coyote.



We moved onto the Alley Series #1 and #2. We drove up to two groups of people putting it away as fast as they could. When they drove by, they said they made it harder than it actually was and good luck. We spent at least 15 minutes looking for it. I finally got this idea of looking at the cement wall for imperfections. Sure enough there it was hidden in a hole in the cement.



The second one of the series wasn't as time consuming or hard to find, actually it was pretty lame, someone didn't put it back right and it was laying on the ground. The next group of caches were near the walking bridge, so we headed on over that way. We tried looking for the one on the bridge but with 30 of us, we came up short. We headed back to the car and had some lunch before moving on to the next group of them. We headed over toward the trains and the railroad tracks for Thomas and Friends.



Cache #35 was Oh Let Me Shine Upon You 2. We drove up and saw at least 15 people searching under rocks frantically. We started turning over rocks. Then one of the cachers called the cache owner to ask for a hint. They said it was near the sign and under a rock, just keep looking. I started turning over rocks and one didn't turn over quite that easy. I had to pull it out of the ground. Everyone was saying I was their hero!



I was on my way for another milestone when we found Whitman Way. That was my 400th cache. Last week at the Bonney Lake event was my 350th. It was our first guard rail cache in Wenatchee.



We went over behind the retail stores to find Shoo. I knew what we were looking for. Carl and BreeAnna joined us for a few of them. We got Carl hooked and now has his own name.



Then the cache machine took us to the waterfront on the Wenatchee side. Lots of walking on the trails and it started raining. Here is Waterdog42 and Oregongatorboy putting the cache back at London Bridge.



We found caches at the Toyota Civic Center, where the Wenatchee Wild play their hockey games, found one at the Sonic, found one near the cemetery in a tree, found fake rocks, lots of magnetic key holders and some altoid tins.



My group and I even got a LTF (last to find). We got to Off The Path and a guy and his grandson pulled up in a orange vehicle. He said "did you know this was private property?" We stood there and stared at the guy. Cacher "The Ghost" took him aside and explained what we were doing. Apparently this was his private property and as the owner no one had come and asked him to place a cache on his land. He had a problem with it and asked for us to remove it. He took the property owner out to the location and retrieved it. I guess there's a first and a last for everything.



From there we found a couple more in the area, Fish N Shrimp, Merry Christmas Navigators, Bridge View (which took several of us a long time to find it) and Senior. We tried looking for the last two which we didn't find. We found out later both were missing. By that time it was time to wrap it up and head on out to the Chinese Buffet. It was raining and everyone was hungry.





We headed over the bridge and luck would have it, THE WENATCHEE APPLE SIGN!! I was so excited to see it! This is one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Wenatchee. I asked Derek if there was a cache here and there was, My Town. We spent a couple minutes taking pictures and looking for the cache.





I really wasn't feeling Chinese food so I asked Derek if Sonic would be an okay place to have dinner. He agreed and we got a couple of burgers, fries and limeades. We took it back to the event and scarfed it down in no time. I didn't realize how hungry I was. We finished up, got out of the car and took pictures of the travel bugs on the vehicles. We went inside and found a place to sit. We sat next to our Oregon buddies and visited for a while. We wrote down and took pictures of everyones coins and travel bugs. About an hour and a half later everyone started getting tired and started to leave. Some had a long drive back that night and others stayed in town. We made it back to Carl's house. Derek took a shower while I logged my finds and then I went and showered while Derek logged his finds. I got really tired around 10:45 p.m. and had to pass out. As soon as my head hit that pillow I was out.


Next adventure:  Nisqually Pirate Cache

The Power Went Out

Sunday night (3/20) the power went out around 11:00 p.m. I sat there in the dark wondering why because the wind wasn't blowing, we didn't hear a loud explosion...hmmm. I got up and grabbed a flashlight and wandered into the living room. Doug was on the couch and probably was watching TV when it went out and dad was asleep in the recliner snoring. I asked why the power went out and Doug said, maybe someone hit a pole? Who knows? We didn't even know if it was a town wide or a local power outage. I worried about my chickens. We got them last Wednesday and we had to keep a heat lamp on them, well without power there is no heat lamp. I didn't want a dozen dead baby chickens to bury the next day. I grabbed a sheet to keep their bin warm. Hopefully their little bodies huddled together to keep themselves warm. We've already had a close encounter of one dying on us a few days ago because it got cold. I slept like crap worrying about my chickens. The next thing I knew it was 5 am and mom was running around the house gathering things. We didn't know when the power would be back on so she was going to take a shower and get ready at work. She left just after 5 and called me. You know that old lady's house across the street from Ramona? Well, they had a bunch of Puget Power guys digging frantically. She also said that it was a portion of the residents on Brandie Ct who didn't have power and we were one of them, Yay! I checked on my chickens, they were still alive. I crawled back in bed wondering if I should take the chickens to Grandma's house, they've been without heat for 6 hours. Maybe the power will turn on soon? Just before 6 am the power came back on and I rushed into the bathroom and took the sheet off my chickens. They were happy that their heat lamp came back on and so was I.

My First CITO with an Event on the Side...

A few weeks ago I was looking at the Groundspeak newsletter that comes out every week in your inbox. I saw that there were a few events coming up. I asked Derek if he was interested in them. We talked about it over the next couple days. I asked my mom if she was interested in it as well. They both said they would so we started planning for it. After all of the rain we've been having this month I was really worried about the weather for Saturday. We hoped it would not rain.

I got up around 7:15 that morning and zombied out of my bed, yesterday was a LONG day. The night before I packed up all the stuff I would need (extra clothes, extra coats, some snacks, gps, geocaching stuff, etc) and left it in a pile next to my bed. I put my clothes on as fast as I could because it was freezing! I started taking stuff out to the car while I waited for mom to get her stuff together. It was about 7:35 and we needed to go. It was going to be a nice day. Yay! No rain! We got to Derek's around 8:05 and helped haul some of his stuff to his car. We threw our stuff in the pack and we were on our way to Dupont. I really didn't know Dupont very well since I really had no reason to go there. I've driven past it thousands of times on the freeway when we drove towards Seattle and came home to Olympia. Derek's college buddy Maggie was going to meet us at the Dupont City Hall. We got there near 8:30 and signed in. They went over what we would be doing today. We would be taking down an old rusty fence over 100 years old and pulling up Scotch Broom. I helped tear down the fence.



It was a collaboration of people from the Dupont community, Fort Lewis, the Watershed Council, people from Pierce and Thurston Counties. Some of these people were geocachers.







We got the fence torn down and most of the Scotch Broom ripped up. It was time to move onto the next phase of the restoration.

We all got together before moving onto the next project down stream.



We piled into the three cars that had authorization to enter the restricted zone. We drove through the golf course and to the edge of the canyon that overlooks the Puget Sound.

"In 1833, the Hudson's Bay Company set up shop on the site in a trading post called Fort Nisqually. The company raised livestock and crops to sell to Russian outposts in Alaska, customers around the Pacific Rim and back home in Britain. Some of the trees planted at the fort still bear fruit. (Fort Nisqually's buildings were moved in 1934 to Point Defiance Park in Tacoma.) In 1994 the site was donated to the Archaeological Conservancy, a national preservation organization.

The 1833 site can still be viewed today as golfers play on DuPont's championship golf course, The Home Course. In fact it is rumored that the first settlers to the area created a six-hole golf course, which would become the first golf course in the Pacfic Northwest.

In 1841, the bluff overlooking Puget Sound and the mouth of Sequalitchew Creek served as an observatory for a major U.S. scientific expedition. At what is now Northwest Landing, members of the expedition under Captain Charles Wilkes set up an observatory (Wilkes Observatory), charted lower Puget Sound and designated landmark names still in use today."

We walked out to the view point and listened to the guy who was in charge.









This is Jerry, he takes care of the trail. He carved the benches you see him here with. They were placed near the Observatory marker.

We walked down as a group on the switchback trail, it was very steep but very beautiful. We passed lots of old trees, ferns, downed trees and saw the creek cut through the valley floor.



We got to the area where we were going to tear down another fence.



Together we got it down in less than an hour.



Since we were down here and we were done cleaning up we walked towards the Puget Sound to see the view. They used to use this railroad to transport dynamite. Some of the geocachers found Riding the Rails 2.







It was nearing noon and we were getting hungry. We started walking back, this time up the public trail. We should have brought our gps's because there were like 8 or 9 of them along the trail back up to City Hall. Mom took pictures as we walked up the hill.





Once we got back to the car at City Hall, we grabbed the gps and looked for the ones nearby. We found Creek Trailhead.



Here is some more information about the history of the area, the creek and what we did that day.

http://www.dupontwa.com/history.htm
http://nisqually-sequalitchew.com/blog/2011/03/20/four-projects-completed-march-19-2011/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sequalitchew/5541744957/in/photostream/

We piled into Derek's car and hit the next closest, How Not to be Seen #1. We got out and found it under a reflector on a telephone pole. This was Derek's 200th find.



We decided we were hungry and needed food. We found a Subway and sat down and ate. It felt good to sit for a while. It was nearing 1:15 when we left and found a few in the area.

We started out with Addiction #16, part of Ohjoy's altoid series. She stole all the places in Dupont too. We saw some kids messing around the statues while we walked toward them. Kids left, found cache quickly and took some pictures.



We were running out of time and we all decided we wanted to be in Bonney Lake early because of all the interest in the event. If we got there late, it might be hard to find a place to sit. We found two more in the area. Addiction #28 and Dupont Trail, situated in a forest area in a townhouse/apartment development. We walked down the trail and the hint kinda confused us..."crook of double next to rear left leg," hmmm. Then someone read the title to us and it made more sense. We got closer and found this really cool tree that did look like an elephant. We got back to its left leg and found it in a tree. We were disappointed because the cache was not an altoids container.



We found the other trail head towards the Dupont Trail cache. I asked Maggie what the hints and other info on the cache. I asked what size it was and she looked at it wrong and said micro. I grabbed the ammo can and said, are you sure? We all laughed. There was a travel bug in there so we discovered it.



We dropped Maggie off at her car and had her follow us there. On our way to Do You Feel Lucky? We got there about 2:20 and mingled with some of the other people. We even had some time to discover a bunch of trackables. Some people ordered pizza and drinks. More and more people started showing up, way more than the host intended. At some point Maggie came back and said that all but one table in the pizzeria had name tags. We played an ice breaker bingo games, he told us about upcoming events and had a raffle for door prizes. Maggie and Derek won a prize from the bingo game and Derek and I won a prize from the raffle. It was a coin. One more to add to my trackables collection. :)

One of the old men told us that there was a cache behind the pizza place. That's the first place we went after taking pictures of the car travel bugs. We got our gps's ready and headed out behind the KFC. The trail took us right to it. This one was called BBQ Chicken and it was a pretty awesome cache.



As we walked away, three other cachers looked for the chicken cache. We pointed them towards the right direction. Dereks gps lead us to nowhere so we turned around and looked for Evil (C)ammo 8. We found out it was on the other side of 410 near the Papa Murphy's. We walked to it and saw it was by one of those green power boxes. This time it wasn't on the green box but next to it.



We walked back across 410 for our next one and a lady yelled to us, "if you go to that one over there, with all the people by it, you'll get a co-FTF!" We hustled over. It was called, The French call it "Suriphobia". There were almost 15 people over there laughing and having a good time. They were waiting for it to post because it was one of the guys' caches. They said not to post it online until one of their buddies comes to look for it. He said he'll poop his pants when he sees that 28 people signed the log before he did and before it posted. Haha.



As a large group we went and found The Awesome Power of Nature. It was another cache done by one of the guys with us. He stepped back and watched us find it. Eventually my gps lead me right to it. Some guy reached over and grabbed it off the tree.



Most of the people we were geocaching with are from the area so they've found most of the ones around here already. We broke off into mini groups, some went home and some went finding more. We headed over to Trick or Treat. The cache was easy to find but the log was more difficult to get to. This was similar to An Eggcelent Cache in Lacey.



We put all the eggs back in and decided to hit the woods. There were five of them out there. The first one was Oliver's Superman Birthday Cache. We headed closer to it and we saw some movement. There were other geocachers in the area. They were trying to hide from us. Haha. They told us that the cache contents were all over the place and they just finished picking them up. The inside of the cache was soaked. Fozzie Bear acted like a huge sponge. You could wring him out. We couldn't sign the log book so we were going to log it and tell the owner there needed to be some huge maintenance on the cache.



Next was the Branch Prediction, a little further in the woods. Our gps lead us to a tree, we searched it out...a few minutes later mine took me to another tree. Low and behold, a film canister attached magnetically to the tree trunk. I took it down and passed it around for everyone to sign.



We headed down the trail towards another birthday cache, Ethan's Batman Birthday. We got to know our group additions as we walked around the woods. We got to the GZ and it looked like someone(s) had built themselves a campfire and forgot their sleeping bag. It was kind of a sketchy place for a family-friendly cache. One of us let the owner know in our online log.



There was one more cache in the forest loop we made, Bethany's 7th Birthday Cache. We took the little trail back towards the businesses and the parking lot. We reached the cache and Derek made the find.



We headed out of the woods and onto our next find, Curb Your Addiction. We all knew it would be in the parking lot of Fred Meyers...but where? I thought it might be a part of the yellow parking space block but I went to far over and I heard Maggie yell, found it! The log book was wet but we decided to write on it anyway. We let the cache owner know to change the book. It was a clever hide. We exchanged information so we all could be contacted later on. I found out that two of the ladies had season tickets to the Storm games. I told them that my friend Shauna had season tickets as well and I go often. We headed back toward the cars and it was time for Maggie to go home. She's been up for a long time and needed some sleep.





The ladies expressed interest in doing another one down the road called Beam Me Up Scottie. You had to bring a TV remote control and there was a LED receiver to show you what to do next. Once you found the red lights the cache would be 11 feet to the right. We met up, put the coords in the gps and off we went. There was a rock wall behind some stores and it had to be in there. The coords took me right to a tree, so I assumed from the tree it would be 11 feet to the right and that's where I went. There were a bunch of snails hanging out. We all looked, and looked and looked for at least an hour. Two of the ladies had to take the little one home, it was getting late and she was getting cold. They drove off. We almost gave up. Two minutes later my mom found the cache behind the snail. I probably, along with everyone else, looked there at least 7 times. We couldn't believe it.



The remaining cachers went and found Bonney Lake Welcomes You. Derek's car gps had us going a bizarre way. We did an illegal move and turned left. The lady following us didn't see us turn. She had to go all the way down to the bottom and turn around. We felt really bad and hoped that she figured it out and found us. We found the ammo can pretty quickly.



We said our goodbyes and told her we had fun caching with her and her friends today. We headed back to Lacey. Derek with 216, me with 350, mom with 91 and Maggie with 25. It was a pretty good caching day. :)