My Adventures and Places Life Takes Me: ET Highway Day 4

Thursday, April 4

ET Highway Day 4

I can't believe this trip has gone by so fast. Just the other day I was looking forward to this trip and was really excited to ride on an airplane and explore southern Nevada with some cool people from Vancouver. It has now come down to the last day on the ET Highway.

Our alarm went off at 6ish and we all lazily got up and started getting ready for our last day on the crazy power trail. I was excited to get to #2000 but then on the other hand it was sad that we were going to find #2000. This time we knew where we were going to go to breakfast so we didn't waste any precious caching time. We drove to the Burger King and all grabbed some sort of a breakfast sandwich and some OJ. We ate as we drove to where we left off.

We got to the first section at 7:47 and began with #1413. There were 45 caches in this line. Brenda started off the morning while Ray drove and I stamped. It was a little chilly this morning and slightly windy. Brenda went all the way through to 1500. When we reached that milestone it was about 9:15 and we almost had our 100 caches for the day. We even saw what used to be the end of the ET Highway before Clay and Gus added 500 more to it.

"The End? Or is it? NO!"

Now it was my turn to get out and jump. Brenda drove and Ray stamped logs. This section was going to be a long one (1842 to 1946 plus a cabin cache at the end) for a total of 105 caches. I powered these out as quick as I could. We got them done in an hour and fifteen minutes. We rewarded ourselves with an old mining homestead east of Highway 6. The cache was called Daugherty Ranch. We don't really know for sure but according to Gus and Clay, that's what it said on Google Maps when they did their research.

We found the cache first and then had fun exploring the ranch. We saw lots of old food cans, oil cans, really old sardine cans, beer cans, clothes, boards, make shift holding pens for horses and cows and old cardboard that they had put over the windows to keep the dust and sand from blowing into the old shack. There was a fireplace inside that had names and dates carved and written on the mantle. There were names and dates on there from the early 1900's. Pretty rad.

It was about 11:00 and we all got into the car and went to the next section of caches, which took roughly a half hour to get there. Remember, we were on dirt roads going maybe 40 mph. We got to the next section and started immediately. We hit our 200th cache around noon. I did the 41 caches starting with #1947 and ending with #1988. Then Ray took over only suppose to be doing 100 of the 168 of them but we messed up the math and he ended up doing all of them, luckily he didn't mind. To give him a break, when we got 100 in to his turn, we pulled over and made sandwiches. This is when the wind started picking up.

Our 300th cache milestone of the day was around 1:00.

We ate our sandwiches, some chips and our drinks and had some light conversations while we took pictures and talked about how many more sections we had to do. We all used the bathroom, behind bushes and in back of our vehicle and we were on our way down the homestretch.

Ray finished his section and then it was my turn again. I did half of what we called "the beak". It actually looked like the shape of a beak from the map. A few times we had to stop because the wind was so strong. It was blowing sand and dust at us and made it really hard to open and close the passenger door.

I was starting to get tired and my leg started to chafe from the repetition of getting in and out of the car and my leg rubbing on the seat. Brenda took over and hammered them out. The wind had gotten so bad, it tried to rip her shirt off of her. We finished the beak at 3:40 and had over 400 finds.

At this point we all reflected on our trip out here in the desert and how many hours we spent out here grabbing containers from piles of rocks. We are almost to the end of our ET Highway experience and it kinda made us all sad but excited at the same time because we were starving. Brenda got them done quickly. We were at the second to last cache called You're Almost Done! Or are you?-E.T. This is Brenda's happy face. It made me giggle.

And now to #2000. It was almost unbelievable that I was actually there. I can't believe I actually got to do the ET Highway. We pulled up next to the side of the road, turned the car off and put it in park. We took pictures of the rocks that led us to the last one and I ran to the cache. I was so excited.

We finished the ET Highway at 4:02 with 457 on the day and we were behind team STFU the entire time, who in reality were an entire day ahead of us. We giggled at the name of their team. We walked back to our vehicle and some guy pulled over to ask if we were okay and if we needed some help. We told him we were find. That was the second time on this trip someone had pulled over to ask if we needed aid. The vehicle we used was filthy on the outside and in.

We found a few more on the way back to Tonopah. We went to our hotel, dropped off our stuff and drove over to Cisco's again. They ordered baked potatoes and I had the burger and fries again. The one the night before was tasty so ordered it again. We ate our food and watched whatever was on the TV on the wall. We finished and went and worked on the earthcache nearby. I took some pictures before it got dark.

We all took showers and got comfortable. We drove to the actual grocery store because Ray wanted a beer and Brenda wanted ice cream. Ray ended up with a beer and Brenda came home with a candy bar. I decided on nothing because I already had some stuff in my bag in the hotel. We got back and started packing up our stuff so we didn't have to do it in the morning. We decided at a group to grab our California and Arizona cache since they were very doable. Ray fell asleep and started snoring. We had to take a picture of him.