We drove west towards I-5. They wanted to stop at the 13th Street exit to have breakfast at Denny's. They had their usual pancakes, eggs and bacon. They tried to share their extra pancake with me but I opted not to eat them. I was still full from my waffles. They finished up, we used the bathroom and then we were on our way down to Battle Ground.
Somewhere between Toledo and the rest stop over by Ridgefield I fell asleep. It was nice. I heard Bob turn Ronnie Milsap on during some part of that nap.
Our first stop was the rest stop just before the exit to Battle Ground. Two years ago, mom and I were down here picking up Erika from the PDX Airport and we stopped here to break the trip up. At the time there were just two caches here. We found both of them. I find myself here again and there is a new one to grab. I walked with Bob and Bev to grab the ones I already had. It was actually hard remembering where they were. They were pretty simple.
We missed an exit that would take us to quite a few but we decided to get on the main highway towards Battle Ground. The first one we stopped for was at an intersection on a metal box. It was a magnetic key holder that was hidden pretty well.
After that, we grabbed about four of them off the back roads and some of them were guard rails. A lot of them were the standard micro in the trees and or bushes...there were plenty of these in the Clark County and Portland area. Then we made our way to Daybreak Park, owned by the county. The East Fork Lewis River flows though the small park. I have been here once before a very long time ago with my dad while we visited my aunt, who lives up the road a few miles. We had a tough time finding the first one until I read the cache page, found it instantly. The next one was on a picnic table and a guy walked over to us wondering what we were up to. We told him exactly what we were doing and he thought it was cool and walked back to where his friends were. We tried looking for another one we couldn't find near a tree down a small trail. The owner later emailed Bev and told her it was there, just inside a thicket of sticker bushes.
We got back in the car and picked up several guard rail caches. One was a Battle Ground Toy Box, one was at the Moose Lodge, one was in the woods next to Salmon Creek, one was in someone's front yard, another was at a church and one of our favorites was in a bell next to a church called Quasimodo. We gave it a favorite point just because.
We grabbed a few more hanging micros in trees and ventured east towards a section of southern Battle Ground, I think it was technically the Bush Prairie area. That took us to one at a baseball park, that one was up in the crotch of the tree, we found two at the Winco, one of them was tricky. It totally pointed to the light pole skirt so we looked in the bushes around it. We almost gave up until I read some of the logs. I knew exactly where to look for it plus I saw who owned it and knew what to look for. A hanging micro in the tree. Then we made it to the other one at the Winco, gave it a few minutes and gave up...there was just too much tree to look through.
We got onto the busy 503 and headed north towards Battle Ground. There was also a walking/bike trail along side of it. Weird thing was, most of the caches along that road (this was a really busy road) were guard rail caches. Luckily, there were pull offs. One required Bob and I to run across the highway to the other side to grab a film canister out from the beat up guard rail. We tried to find them as quick as we could just because we didn't want a cop paying us a visit. We found it quickly, signed it and ran back across the road to the car. We stopped for a few others before meeting up at the Chamber of Commerce in the middle of town.
We had to grab five caches in Battle Ground for them to count on our passport. We made quick work of it. We found The Hanging Tree, I Hate LPC's #3, $30,000 Wonder (which was a little confusing but we figured it out, see pic below), Dead Horse Lane and Home Sweet House Church.
We had enough time to go and sign in and grab our passports before the event got too full and busy. I immediately saw Ray and Brenda. We visited with them for a while. We found out earlier that the caches for the event published at 9 a.m. this morning. That meant all of them were found already and we physically had to find each cache's coordinates on the website, via a smart phone. That took a while. The hosts did not have them printed on the passports. We did our query the night before because we were leaving at 6:30 this morning. There would be no way to put them on our GPS's. Unless someone else had a Oregon 400t and could technology hump them to us one by one.
We mingled with everyone else and Bob and Bev decided to look for one down the road along with other people. No one could find it. They all came back to the gazebo. The host got things rolling by saying that he appreciated everyone coming out to participate and he did a few raffle prizes. No one I knew won. And everyone was off, some already did them all and headed to the fairgrounds for their coins and the other half started their cache quest. We ran into several cachers as we collected our caches and codes. We had a few bumps on our journey.
One of the caches was already missing and the host had no idea he was going to fix it. Luckily, we only had to get five of the ten new ones to get the coin. Several were 4-5 miles away from town and we decided not to do those ones. We did the five closest ones to town. We grabbed Green Green Green, Community Garden, Tunnel to the Other Side, Welcome to the Village and Rocks Galore. All of them were pretty easy to find because whenever we arrived someone was always there signing the log book.
We grabbed four more before heading to the fairgrounds. One called Dorky Park was really hard to find the entrance to. I found it funny that the real name to the park was Hidden Glen. It was sure hidden from us! Haha. The cache was on the bridge but not where you think it would be. I ended up finding it by accident. I took pictures as a souvenir.
From Dorky Park, we decided we needed to get to the fairgrounds to get our coin. It was hot outside. We found a parking spot along the road near the railroad tracks. We got out and made the short walk to the fairground entrance. Immediately I saw a life-sized version of Lightning McQueen from Cars. I HAD to get a picture with it. We wandered through the booths and found the Chamber of Commerce one. We said hi and handed her our passports. We engaged in some small talk and she handed us our coins. We thanked her and wandered around the fair for a few minutes. Before we left, we used the bathroom and got a picture with Lightening McQueen!
We walked back the car and went back towards downtown for a few more caches. One was in plain sight of an old drive through of a bank and the other was inside a small park on a fish sculpture. Immediately after I found it, signed it and put it back, another couple cachers walked up looking for it. I told them the container was hard to open because it is a metal rusted container.
We drove a little north of town for a cache called Ouch!!! I got worried. I really didn't want any owies. The parking was at the end of a housing development and while we read the logs, we were in the right place even though it didn't seem like it. We walked over a hump and into a huge field of clovers. It was insane! We followed the small trail to an area of trees and brush. The tree is what was ouch. We thought we were looking for a micro but instead it was a regular. We walked past it at least 6 times before Bob dug it out of the grass. We signed it, put it back where we found it and made our way back to the car.
We found a few more around the west part of town and came up to one that baffled us on how to get down to it. We spent some time reading logs and went and parked by the bank. Bev was going to stay in the car while Bob and I tried to figure out how to get this one. We walked along the sidewalk and found where people had gone. I got scratched up by the sticker bushes, I was not happy. We found the tree the cache was hiding in. We walked back to the car and my leg was bleeding.
We started heading home on the 502 towards I-5. We picked one up at the vet's office and tried to get one up on top of the hill but the road didn't go through like it showed on the GPS. I hate that when that happens. However, we got a great view of my favorite mountain in the cascades, Mt. St. Helens.
We were getting to the end of the road and we decided to take 10th Ave north to the east side of Ridgefield, there we grabbed 7 before calling it quits. There was a bunch of guardrail ones and one near a halibut restaurant. Then we hit a detour that took us to the free way.
We got on I-5 north and made our way towards home. We stopped at Taco Time in Kelso for some crispy burritos. We got home before 9.
Next Adventure: WSGA Campout at Timberlake Campgrounds along Hwy 14.
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