The alarm went off at 6:30. I found out dad was taking the day off and Doug was going to come home later this afternoon. Of course he gave me a bad time about going geocaching. I remembered to grab my phone charger out of my car since my battery goes dead around the tail end of our caching trips.
They rolled up and I threw my stuff in the car and we were off to Fox Island via the back roads of Steilacoom and western Tacoma to Hwy 16 and the Narrows Bridge. Bob and to pull over because he got dizzy so Bev drove us to the first few caches.
We got off at the airport exit and grabbed two we didn't get the first time we were over here...which was awhile ago. One was new and the other one we DNF'd because I think it was missing. We found it this time very quickly. The next one was along East Bay Drive called Picnic Point. It was a very nice view of the Harbor from the cache site.
And now a place called Harbor Family Park...a place you could actually lose your family inside of. The first one was an ammo can stuck underneath a weird foam like rock creation. I saw it right away because it didn't fit into the surroundings.
The next one was even cooler. We all walked past it and on the way back out of the area I spotted something up in a tree and then looked around for a TOTT (tool of the trade) to get it down with. There was a handle with a nail on it laying on the ground with stuff written on it with a marker. I grabbed it and put it to some good use.
Next was a cryptex cipher cache that I found the code word to as we walked down the trail. None of us have actually opened a decvice that looked that that before so it was kinda fun. I put the magic word in and watched it open and inside was the log.
We picked up one more on our way to Fox Island inside a guardrail. There was a lot of traffic on this road. Next stop, Fox Island!
We stopped after we crossed the bridge for a very creative one. I'm glad Bob found it. There was a fisherman loading up his boat down below after a morning of fishing.
We rolled up to the next one, got out of the car and another vehicle drove down the hill and parked. We saw the TB and knew she was a cacher. In fact, it was the cache owner of the current cache we were looking for. She came down to check on this one because of the recent DNF's. She introduced herself as MorkIsle. While chatting, I found the cache on the ground. We signed it and then returned it to its rightful place. It was nice meeting her. Most of the caches on the island belonged to her and she said none of them should be that hard.
The next ten or so were her caches along with a historical series we needed codes from for the final. Of course there was the geocache in the local cemetery. This one took us to some of the famous people's gravestones who either founded or lived on the island. At first we had trouble finding the gravestones because the coords jumped around. One of the waypoints took us to our first female governor of Washington State, Dixy Lee Ray.
One of the things I love about geocaching is the history you learn as you visit these unique places.
At I'm in a pickle, we hit our first DNF that we knew was there. For some reason we really made this one harder than it actually was. We read the logs and the same thing was happening to us. It was listed as a 1.5/1.5. It couldn't be that hard right? We moved on and thought about coming to this one later. We found a few more before running into a mom and daughter caching couple. The daughter was living in Tacoma and the mom was from Eugene. The island was small enough, you were bound to run into someone. We chatted with them for a bit and then went down to the Fox Harbor pier.
We found the cache nearby and went to the next bunch of them. We ran into the cachers again at the Fox Island Ferry dock II. They had just found the Pickle one we could not find. She showed us a picture of where to find it. We also traded TB's. We went on to grab a few more before returning to the pickle one.
We drove back to it and sure enough a place we thought we checked a bunch of times, there it was smiling back at us like we were stupid. Eff you pickle! Haha.
We did our math to the final of the Fox Island historical series and made our way to the final. For a while we had the wrong side of the road until we ventured to the other and read the hint some more. Bob found it eventually. We found one more on the island, went back over the bridge and found two more on the way home. We were even honked at angrily by a butthole in a SUV who could clearly move into the other lane if he didn't want to follow us.
And then the phone went off. A cache had just published in Steilacoom. We had a somewhat semi good chance at getting FTF. We went back over the Narrows and had to pay the lame toll fee, back along the west side of Tacoma and onto the back roads of Steilacoom. We followed Nuvi to the parking lot and saw a silver Prius waiting. Poo, they must have gotten it. I walked over and Omnispirit and Kogcon had just walked back from signing the cache. They said they were second to find and couldn't read the FTF signature. He gave us some hints on where to find it. We walked over there and found it within ten minutes of searching. We got back in the car and headed towards home.
Bob wanted pizza so we called in our order and picked it up from Pizza Hunt and it was a nice day so we ate dinner in Cochran Park. The bees wanted pizza too. We wrapped it up and they took me home. It was a nice day and we found 38 and DNF'd only 3. Thus completes day 22 of the 31/31 in August streak.
Next Adventure: Round Mountain and Lake Wenatchee with Jacob (Shrek198)
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