I thought I should go because I have some caches in the cache machine and I should do my own hometown one anyway. I had a few random ones I still had to get.
Ray got a hold of me a few days before with the private route and what time and where we were going to meet up. I got my stuff ready the night before. I was exhausted and I knew Saturday would be a very long day.
My alarm went off at 6:30 and I really did not want to get up. I threw my clothes on, it was suppose to be a nice day, so I wore shorts. I grabbed my caching backpack, my gps, camera, phone and a few snacks for along the way.
I was suppose to meet them at cache #1 at 7:30 a.m., I left my house just before 7. It takes about 45 minutes to get to west side Olympia. I got there at 7:27. I love that no one was on the roads that early...except for the geocachers of course. Brenda and Ray were waiting for me in the parking lot where the Old Navy used to be. They found the cache in the small rock wall before I got there. A few minutes later Jim arrived in his brand new 2014 Subaru Forester. I gathered my stuff for the day and threw it in the trunk. I got in the back seat with Brenda, it even had the new car smell. Between Ray and him, they had all of the gps's ready to go. Off we went!
The morning went by pretty fast. We started near Evergreen and I found out I had a few caches over that way I haven't found yet. I ended up talking to Lisa, a co-worker of mine, through out some of the caches along Puget Sound north of downtown Oly about a job I recently applied for. She said to keep an open mind and I may be in a different group later on in the year. My mood from the day before got a little better.
I have been to most of them so I tried not to be annoying by showing them where the cache was. I tried to let them find it before I assisted in any way. Some of them they wanted to know where it was and some of them I simply could not remember because it was so long ago...some of them more than two years ago.
We went into downtown Oly and spent some time near the Farmer's Market. I knew we would not be doing a lot of the ones near the market because everyone would see us and about a month ago, OhJoy disabled most of her caches so people would not be able to find them, which is understandable because most of hers are in sensitive areas. They would suffer with that amount of traffic in one day by cachers walking through. However, she prematurely disabled them and none of the locals could go out caching prior to the cache machine. One or two weeks before could have sufficed.
We got to caches 20-25 and they definitely brought back memories. They brought us to the area between downtown Oly and the west side of Lacey near the Watershed Park. I could not remember where the Offering for the Creature was. That one took us a while to find. Woodworkers was one of my favorites because of the little carvings of workers nearby. I knew the cache was on one of the trees but could not remember which one. Brenda had fun.
The nano on the fire hydrant was easy, that one took me two trips a few years back to find. Payback 9 was also one of my favorites. It was one of the very few OhJoy caches on the cache machine. Someday I would really like to go rollerblading on top of the structure. This is where we met our first set of cachers, they were from Seattle. We had never heard of their names before today. We discovered their TB on the back of the car.
We got a few more and then it was lunch time. We parked the car in the parking lot of the Olympia Food Co-op and ate lunch out of the back of Jim's new car. Jim ate a sandwich and Brenda and Ray had a really tasty salad and they shared some of it with me because I had only brought snacks. I ran out of time last night to make some proper food. The salad was really good.
Some of them I could remember and I could give them a general hint to get them to the spot. There was one I visited a few years ago in the dark. I was really happy to visit it in the daytime as well. I thought it was a very clever yet cute cache.
The cache was inside the ACME ball. Sadly, the cap to the cache was missing and the logbook was soaked. Ray and I got out one of our ET Highway logs and replaced it. It was too bad we didn't have an extra cap to keep that logbook from getting wet.
We made our way over towards St. Martin's area and grabbed 11 easy ones and I actually remembered where they were. Before Ray, Brenda and Jim got out of the car they asked for some hints. I couldn't believe how much the caches have moved since I found them. Some of them were actually hard to find again.
We took a short walk on the CWT to go grab My Favorite Things-CWT. I remember coming here twice, once on my bike and once walking. I remember the coords being terrible and we spent a huge amount of time looking for it. The first time it was missing and then replaced. The second time we looked on the other side of the trail and found it. Today, we walked right up to it and walked back quickly to the car to move on to the others along the route.
The next section took us near LBA Park and Olympia High School. We were scooting right along until we got to one I've had problems with. I came here over a year ago with my mom to grab this one since we were in the area and I needed a cache for the day, this is when I was doing my 365 days in a row streak. It was on the opposite corner of the soccer fields for OHS. Jim parked the car and opted to sit there and wait until we found it. We went in there and there were tons of ants and very large ant piles. I decided to stab a stick into one.
While we looked for this one, two other cachers joined in the searching efforts. I didn't get their names but they were very happy when we finally found the cache, which was about 40 feet off. I was relieved to have finally gotten this one off the list. I even remember searching in the area I found it in. Hmmm...
The next few took us to Capitol Blvd and to many I had fun finding the first time. It was hilarious watching Ray and Jim look for the one near the flower lady, Brenda and I stayed in the car. Ray said he saw the cache when we were pulling into the driveway. We grabbed the Tiki Bridge really quickly and moved onto the Tumwater area. Jim thought he knew where he was going and we ended up making a few U-turns. Some of them were really difficult to remember where they were, but then again many of these we were going to I found in the dark.
We made it back into Tumwater at the 2nd Street Micro is where we met up with Lookout Lisa, kidvegas19, Bikely and TheDiver. We exchanged some quick conversation and moved onto 47th Parallel. It was a new cache I watched publish a few weeks ago. Apparently there were two of them and I got them mixed up. We found a place to park nearby, Ray, Brenda and I went and grabbed it.
At cache #63, Baa Baa Blacksheep, I remember going to in the daytime, but there was construction on Trosper Road...ironically I found it exactly 2 years ago today. I told Ray before he got out of the car that the container was really weird to open and may take him a while. We sat in the car and upon his return he showed us the five dollar bill he found in the pull out just behind the car.
Do not open 'till Christmas was the one that moved about a yard from where I found it last. I actually thought it went MIA until Brenda saw it through a hole in the fence. It was now on the other side of the fence instead of in the molested falling apart stump nearby. I was in awe. I did warn her that it did make a sound when you opened it. She was still surprised, as she almost dropped it on the ground. Haha.
We went to Zen's Pit, another one I went to around dusk-ish last time I was there, I really don't remember how we got into the pit but now it's more over grown. We found a trail and made our way in and found the cache quickly and unscathed from the sticker bushes that lined the trail. We drove up on the hill to the next one over looking the State Capitol building. I remember there being an actual letterbox nearby. Brenda and Ray wanted to see it so I pulled it out of its hidey hole. We found the actual cache and logged it. I never got to walk up to the top so we went up to see the view. I should have brought my camera with me. Ray got a picture.
Then we went on top of the hill near the courthouse and found a few other quick ones. One did require all of us to get out of the car and find. We let Jim find this one.
We were starting to run out of time and we wanted to be at the event dinner before everyone got there so we took a quick detour. Sadly, the ones we did skip were the ones along the trail in the Tumwater Falls park. We all agreed to go grab my caches before we went to the dinner. We went to Tumwater Falls Historical Park, that gave you a great view of the old brewery. This was a separate part to the falls park above. I let everyone find it before I gave them a hint. Brenda made the find. I picked this spot for a reason, isn't it a great view?
We went to the last one, Pretty Odd Oly, my only rock wall cache. About a month ago, Bev and I drove around doing some maintenance on my caches, put in new logbooks, updating coords, etc. I knew there would be a bunch of people and not a lot of log space for names. That's just what you do when your caches are involved in a cache machine. I was pretty proud of that.
They found it quickly and Jim drove us back where our cars were parked. They were ovens inside. I had Brenda and Ray follow me downtown to Ramblin Jack's. I've never been there and I live nearby. I knew there wouldn't be any close parking so I went and found a parking meter across the street. Parking was free on the weekends so I didn't have to worry about coming up with some change. I grabbed my stuff and my name tag and walked on over.
I saw Bob and Bev made it. I talked to them for a little while. Brenda and Ray were with us, Dan talked to us, Sean made an appearance, I saw Dwight and Gabe, talked to Ben and Jayme, Abby came over for a while, Lisa visited for a while and asked me where the best place for dinner was and I told her the Fish Tale, down the road. Brenda and Ray shared their food with me because twenty dollars was pretty expensive and I had a bbq/bon fire to go to later on that evening. I had my trackables out to discover and some people did stop by to look at them. I stayed until about 8:30-8:45. Then I had Brenda and Ray follow me home so they could find Make Me a Sammich and take the bag of trackables home with them. They enjoyed the creativity of the cache, even though it was hit by a tree a couple weeks ago. I need to do some maintenance on it. They drove home afterwards. I went to my bon fire/bbq over at Celeste's house.
Thanks to everyone who found my caches on the cache machine, Jim for letting me ride with him and Brenda and Ray for inviting me to go along. You are very nice people and I am happy I met you. :)
"Well, we had another great time with Jim and our special guest Val during the Olympia Cache Machine. This was our first time to Olympia and it was nice to see the sites and surroundings while we were looking for caches. The weather turned out perfect for caching with low clouds and fog in the morning and burning off to clear blue skies the rest of the day. We ended up finding 70 caches for the day which wasn’t too bad. At the dinner we had a good time talking with cachers that we hadn’t seen in a while along with one’s that we cached with recently. We are looking forward to next cache machine which will be in Bend Oregon on September 21, 2013."
-Brenda and Ray (Geek&Gopher) written on the WSGA SW Chapter Facebook page.
Photos were taken by Ray with a Garmin Oregon 600T and a HTC Android smartphone, those were instagrammed by Val.
Next Adventure: Washington State GeoTours: Coast Edition
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