We checked out of our hotel and hit up the Safeway to replenish our water, ice, bread etc. I went over to the beer section just to see if they had any local stuff to try. They had some Grand Canyon Ale brewed in the near by town of Williams. I wondered if it tastes like the Grand Canyon? We will find out later that night. Of course I was carded but the cashier was very surprised I was 30 and look the way I do.
We hit the road towards Cadiz and arrived at the first one around 8:15. There was a message written in the rocks near the cache that said They Boys we turned it into The Boobs! Haha. I told Brenda and Ray that our name next year should be The Boobs. Since this trail started to the north and worked its way south, we actually started at 400 and worked our way towards the smaller numbers. That also meant we would be jumping from the opposite side of the van. Thank you van for having two sliding doors.
Brenda jumped first while it was still coolish outside. Ray drove, Jim navigated and I stamped.
Nothing says power trail like a good dirt road! Our van got so filthy.
We hit our first 100 caches around 9:45, this section is where I hit my 9,000th cache milestone. Brenda had some interesting finds including one hidden near a giant tire and one in a broken down rusty car.
It was my turn to jump so we did some switching. It was getting warmer. We took a break, found and set up Ray's Kindle so we could listen to some music while we cached. The quiet dirt road was getting to everyone.
We even saw a bunny.
We managed to get through 175 of the Cadiz caches before we had to turn around. The sand was getting really deep and we didn't know how much deeper it would get and if we did get stuck how would we get help out? We turned around at cache #221 and made our way back to California 62. It took an hour to get to the main road. We stopped near the road and decided to take a lunch break before we dove back into the HMD Series.
Gotta love those PBJ sandwiches and chips right?
After lunch we got back into it. I finished part of my 100 and Ray jumped out for his share of the caches. I drove. It was interesting. I even had a epic blow by. It was by at least 200 feet. Whoops!
We grabbed a few extra caches in between the HMD caches. We didn't realize a lot of the caches would not be there. Ray and Brenda didn't bring any film containers, Jim did but not very many and I didn't bring any because I thought Ray and Brenda would so...we had to make these ones last as long as we could.
One of the extra ones was a virtual called At The Sign Post Ahead (GCHBK7) and it was pretty cool. It had so many weird things people have added over the years on it. I added some flare of my own.
We were up to 300 caches by 2:30 and we decided we would end at HMD #500. It was about two hours later when we hit our quota of about 400 caches for the day. It would be about an hour before we were in 29 Palms which was right around dinner time. En route we all decided that BBQ sounded delicious. We put it into Nuvi and The Rib Co popped up on the screen.
The food was tasty. I had a burger and fries and you could see them BBQing our food from outside. It was lucky we got there when we did because a huge group of people walked in. We assumed they were hikers/climbers and that they have been at Joshua Tree all day long according to their shirts they were wearing. After dinner, we stopped at the Rite Aid to check on cache containers. We decided on some Easter eggs just in case we ran out. On the way to our hotel we saw a mural of a roadrunner and had to take a picture with it since we were Team Roadrunners. Yes, I am poking it in the butt.
We checked into our hotel and it had a pool and a hot tub. You bet your ass we were in the pool and hot tub after we got all situated. I dumped a pound of sand out of my shoes as we were taking turns taking showers after relaxing in the hot tub. It felt great to be clean. We talked about what we were going to do tomorrow and we all decided to grab the last 500 caches instead of breaking it up into two days. We were going to use Friday as a sight seeing day/29 Palms caching day. Tomorrow was going to be a long hot day. Bring it!
Cache total: 9,227
Next Adventure: The California Desert and Finishing HMD Series Caching: Day 6
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