We slept until about 6:30-6:45 and woke up to the sound of an owl hooting. Ugh. Okay, we'll get up. It was starting to get warm in the tent anyway. We got dressed and grab everything we would need. Before we left, our neighbor with the RV came out and we visited for a while. They were from Arizona. We ate our cereal, bananas and chewy bars while we drove to Kennewick. We accidentally drove past the hotel and had to turn around. We parked in the parking lot, grabbed the stuff we would need and hopped into the truck.
We worked on Kennewick and Pasco this morning. We found some of the similar hides as we did the day before. Bird houses, fake green circular water covers, hides inside bushes, etc. We made it down towards the Columbia River to Columbia Park. There was a two-fer, one of the coin challenge caches (GC475D9) and a virtual called U-98 (GC6E69), both centered around the hydro place races held in the Tri-Cities every year.
We grabbed a few more Kennewick caches. They took us mostly to parks. One took us to Kaywaydin Park to (GC4A6QP), which sits up against one of the oldest canals in the Tri-Cities, Columbia Canal. This park where the museum was, it featured the famous Kennewick Man (GC1MPT5).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennewick_Man
K02-Tri-Cities 2013 Geocoin Challenge (GC475DE) brought us to Clover Island. In 1946, the Port of Kennewick purchased Clover Island, a low stretch of land in the middle of the Columbia between Kennewick and Pasco. The island soon had a barge-building site run by Columbia Marine Shipyards. In 1953, Clover Island was expanded to 12 acres and was connected to the mainland by a 700-foot-long causeway. Development of the island continued with the Metz Marina and boat dock, a clubhouse for the Clover Island Yacht Club, and a $350,000 U.S. Coast Guard Station, staffed by 13 servicemen. In 2010, the Port of Kennewick initiated a revitalization of Clover Island including an upgrade of the Clover Island Marina and the construction of a new retail-office building, which included the Ice Harbor Brewing Company restaurant and craft brewer. As a part of the revitalization, the Port also dedicated a new Gateway to the island and a working lighthouse at Lighthouse Plaza on the west end of the island.
We found three caches before we left the island. The other two were easy finds.
We left Clover Island and headed up the hill to grab two more of the Kennewick caches. Once we found those with the accompanying codes, we typed the address to the parks and rec department into the Nuvi and we were on our way to earn the second piece to our coin. The address and coords on the paper were wrong. They took us further up the hill to a fire department. We asked the gal inside and she found the correct address. It was down by the school close to where we found one of the caches. I wonder why we had the wrong address? We went down the hill to where we just came from. I guess the parks and rec department moved into their new building. We grabbed our second piece to our new coin around 10:30 that morning and then drove over the bridge into Pasco.
We ran into Shelrik and his wife a couple times during the day.
We drove to the closest one to us when we entered Pasco, (GC45KY3) P06-2013 Geocoin Challenge, took us to the other side of the river and we found one of the many the bird houses. We wanted to get done with this as quickly as we could so we started seeing how far away each of them were from our current location. We got into a rhythm and soon it was becoming more and more easy. A few of them were missing so we had to write the code on our passport from the cache page.
P03-2013 Geocoin Challenge (GC45Z9X) brought us to the cemetery. It seems like I've been to every cemetery between Washington and Oregon since I've been caching. Afterwards, we found a cache called RIP #3 (GC4R8P8). It was hard to find it inside the thorny tree because we were looking for it in the wrong tree at first.
We ate lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while we found the three last caches in the Pasco series. a then drove to the parks and rec division, wandered through their halls and finally found the desk to get our third piece to our coin . We did it! We finished just before one. We all went back to the hotel, threw our stuff in the car and decided to go our separate ways. Ben and I went across the street to rummage through the Value Village. We found some good stuff.
I wanted to take him to the 9-11 memorial up the highway before we left town. We snaked our way thorough Kennewick and got onto the 395. We got out of the car and it was pretty darn windy. I had Ben find the cache there, we took pictures and then tried to throw the disc around.
We thought we should head back the campsite before the meet and greet. We pulled onto the 240 to Horn Rapids and had to follow a car with a bike on top of its roof going under the speed limit. This road was very busy. I had my GPS set to one coming up called #24 Turnout T's P&G (GC195J6) and about half way there my thermostat decides to climb. We pulled over onto the turn out as it was smoking. Luckily, we got to the cache so we had something to do while we waited for it to cool down. Stupid car. I am getting really tired of it overheating.
We got it cooled down and added more antifreeze to the reservoir. We left a huge mess in the middle of the turn out. We grabbed Road Closed (GC14MW2) and made it back to the campsite before anything else exciting happened. When we got there, we saw more people had arrived that day to set up their camp whether it was tent or RV. We saw Ray and Brenda had showed up while we were gone. I mentioned that we wanted to do the rest of the Horn Rapids series but didn't really want to take my car after our little episode.
They agreed and we went and did #14 to #00 in no time. Brenda looked at the scrapbook I made from our California trip back in April. We finished in a little over an hour and drove back to the camp to grab a few things before driving into town. We ate at Bruchi's for dinner and then made our way to the meet and greet.
http://www.bruchis.com/
We were about a half hour early to the event. We signed in and started mingling with the others while we played geocaching bingo. We did a lot of visiting, had a raffle (I was off by one number) and left to go back to the campsite.
First, we got ice for our cooler than had eggs, drinks and sausage inside. We had planned on using it for tomorrow's breakfast.
We got back to the campgrounds and re-organized our stuff and then joined Brenda and Ray at their campsite to hang out and talk before bed time.
Next Adventure: TriCities Geocoin Challenge Day 3
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