An Earthcache on Earth Day

The weather has sucked since October.  We've had very few dry days and we all were really getting tired of the constant rain.  I saw that an earthcache, A View of Kettle View (GC6WPEA) had been published just down the road from where we lived and I wanted to go get it.  Plus, we got a badge for the 3 millionth cache that was recently published if we found a cache or went to an event this weekend.  I was game.  "Ben!  Let's go get an earthcache on Earth Day!"  He said sure.

Someone had knocked on our door as we were getting ready.  I really didn't like answering the door if I didn't know anyone was coming over.  So I ignored it.  I went in the kitchen to get some cereal and saw some guy using a machine on our lawn.  I had Ben go outside to see what was happening.  Turns out a company sends out a guy every year to aerate the lawn.  I wish someone would have emailed us so we knew it was happening.  He was only here for about a half hour.  Our lawn isn't really that big.  I went outside and the small chunks of earth brought me back to when I was in high school and they did that to the lawns on the school's campus.  We would call it "turding the lawn" because they looked like small turds.  During track and fastpitch practice we would throw them at each other.  I picked up a couple of them and threw them at Ben.

Of course it was rainy...off and on.  I wore my waterproof hiking shoes and a jacket, hopped in the Escape and drove down Yelm Highway.  I've been to Kettle View park a few times over the years while binge caching, this is when I got addicted, in the beginning.  Kettle View is a small park sort of in the center of where Lacey, Tumwater and Olympia merge.  I am not actually sure what city this park is actually in.  It has a small playground area, a tennis court, basketball hoops and a walking trail.  Some of the housing complex's nearby are still unfinished. 

I open the app and read what we have to do.  We didn't have to do anything outrageous but mostly answer questions about kettles in an area we really couldn't see past the brush and trees.  That made it extremely hard.  You knew there were kettles but answering the questions would have to be pretty vague.  Such as:

"There is a lot of sediment in the area, the topography varies and this one isn't deep enough to reach the aquifer. The piece that we noticed that gave it away was the abundance of overgrowth. It made it really hard to see. The deeper kettle just further up the dirt trail (outside the park) we could see inside the kettle because that one did reach the aquifer allowing not as many plants and trees to obstruct the view."

I think I answered three of the four questions with something about an obstructed view.  I'm pretty sure we answered everything to the best of our knowledge but we will see when we get an email back from the cache owner.  We took a few pictures and tried to avoid getting rained on that much.  It sprinkled but we managed to not get entirely soaked.

Ben wanted to stop at Lowe's to price out some stuff.  We ended up looking at lawn mowers, plastic bins and we ended up buying some lime and turf builder for our lawn.  We won some free lightbulbs and a shower head just for walking into the store.  We headed out to Fred Meyer because we wanted some plastic bins but didn't like Lowe's prices.  We wanted to start organizing our garage and Ben needed some bins instead of keeping his stuff inside of paper cardboard boxes.  We didn't want our lovely rats and mice ruining his stuff.

We got home and for the rest of the day we cleaned, washed laundry and got ready for our upcoming week.  Ben did some homework for his classes and studied for his firefighters exam coming up in the next few weeks.

Next Adventure:  Seattle, Pike's Place Market and a Sounder's Game