I kept getting DNF messages in my email and in my messages on the geocaching app and I was getting tired of seeing them. I didn't want to go by myself, but Mom was at Saturday sew in Rainier and Ben was on a 24-hour shift at the fire station, so I asked Bev on the Friday before if she wanted to go on an adventure to Eatonville. I needed to go check on some of my caches and grab some of the new ones in the area including the Adventure Lab. She said she had to ask Bob and then she got back to me stating that she could go.
I told her I would come and get her around 10:30 the next day. That afternoon I got a table with newspapers set up in the driveway. I got some of my containers I have been meaning to spray paint with camo paint up on the table since it was a decent day. I managed to get a bunch of them painted because I would need some of them for our short trip to Eatonville the next day.
I got up, ate a quick breakfast, got all of my stuff in the Escape and headed out to Rainier just before 10 a.m. We had a quick bout of thunder and lightning with a little bit of rain. I thought it was supposed to be nice. Where is this weather coming from? I hope it goes away.
I got into Rainier and down to their house. Bob was in the garden and Bev was ready to go after she went to the bathroom one more time. We said bye to Bob and drove out to Eatonville. It didn't take us long to get out there since the roads weren't that busy. We got onto Hwy 7 and went the long way around to Eatonville.
Our first stop was to pick up a geocache. Just outside of Ohop, we stopped near Silver Lake on a side road to pick up Freddy the Frog (GC9Y575). The 3D printed frog head was hidden between two trees on the ground. It was an easy search. We got our names on it, I got a picture and put it back. We got back on the highway and headed to the first one of mine I had to do maintenance on.
Rainier100 3: Ohop Pioneers (GC6KEW0) is a cache I have been out to fix a lot in the recent years. I am not sure how this goes missing so often. I know it's by the Ohop Pioneer Farm but still. There is also a letterbox nearby not associated with geocaching, but people seem to not care and log that one anyway. Indeed, after a brief search, the cache was gone. I got out one of my freshly painted containers from the day before, got a logbook, a baggie and a couple pieces of swag and hit it back behind the sign. Maybe this will stay put for a while.
We got back onto Hwy 7 and drove a few miles to the Pack Forest. We followed the road to the parking area and to our surprise, the parking area was kinda full. That was a first for me while doing maintenance on Rainier100 2: Pack Forest (GC63GN3). We found a place to park, grabbed an extra container and we headed the short distance to where I hit it along the small dirt trail. There were some places along the way that were still wet and muddy. We got to the area and the "spire" that I hid it near had finally fallen over and the cache was nowhere to be seen (if someone had moved it somewhere else, I could not find it) so I had to find a new place to hide it. I hid it next to a large tree right off the trail. I gathered some new coordinates and back to the Escape we went.
From there we got back onto Hwy 7 and drove the "swirly" way towards Alder. We stopped in a pullout and searched for Gruncle Sees Red (GC9Z3KC). We had a heck of a time searching for it because it was hidden very well. We did find it, got our names on it and put it back exactly how we found it. We got back onto Hwy 7 and further down the highway.
We saw there was another one along the highway we didn't have so we found the nearest pullout, got out and found Watch the Railing (GC9Z090) right away due to it being the same hide as the previous one.
We drove into Eatonville from the south while having the Eatonville Adventure Lab open to see where we needed to go, without too much backtracking. We grabbed the one at the Bud Blancher Trailhead because of the way we entered town. When we got back onto the road to go to our next stop, I saw an Eatonville Police SUV sitting on the side of the road and it looked just like Shauna. I texted her to see if it was her. She wrote me back a couple minutes later saying it was her and that I should stop by the police station when we weren't busy.
Then we saw a cluster of three waypoints at Mill Pond Park, so that is where we went next. My cache, Rainier100 4: Eaton of the Ville (GC6R8PV) was also located in this area, so I brought an extra cache with me to replace it after we did the three waypoints.
So, I came here back in February 2022 to replace the cache that was missing. I was not sure where it went to, so I had to hide it in a different spot that may get compromised in the near future. I asked cachers if they found the original container to message me. No one ever did. While doing maintenance with Bev we looked everywhere for it and could not find anything. Someone had mentioned something about the wash tub on the deck, so I looked. A cacher had placed the original cache container in the wash tub. Why do people do that? Why do they move them? It was a wet logbook, in bits, hidden inside a large Ziplock bag. I spent some time getting it into a new container with a logbook and baggie and hid it where it was supposed to go, under the deck near the cabin on the SW corner of the building. I hope it stayed there but we will see.
Our last stop for the Adventure Lab was at the old Roxy Theater in town. People have been watching movies in that theater for over 100 years. That is a crazy statistic. I told Shauna we would stop by, so we found some parking on the side of the building and wasn't sure where to go. I texted her again asking where we needed to enter from, and she said the back. We walked to the back, and she let us in. She was on lunch and the only one on shift that day. We hung out with her for about a half hour while she waited for her food to heat up in the oven. We told her what we were doing in Eatonville, and she got to meet Bev and Bev got to meet her. I haven't seen Shauna in a while because we've been so busy with life and stuff. Before we left, she gave us Eatonville Police Junior Officer stickers. I thanked her and told her I would see her around.
We walked back out to the Escape and went to go grab the Bonus Cache: Eatonville Adventure Lab (GCA6Q8V). And this is where we had to backtrack. We had to go back to the Bud Blancher Trailhead to get the bonus cache. We parked and actually had to walk down the trail, over the bridge and the Mashal River and to a large stump, where we had found a cache in the past that has since been archived. I went down to retrieve it since Bev didn't want to walk down the hill and then would have to try and get back up the hill. I got our names on it, put it back and we walked back up to the Escape.
We went home on Hwy 161 and then turned onto the Eatonville Cutoff Road to Hwy 7. We got onto 702 and into McKenna. I went home the back way through Vail and took Bev home. I went inside and had a piece of her banana bread fail and gave her a puzzle I've had in the car for them for a couple weeks. She thanked me for a fun day, and I left and went over to Mom and Dad's house to help take the back porch apart with Doug since it is a huge safety hazard. I am not sure what Dad wants to do with the space now that the old boards are pulled up. Time will tell.
When we were done, we drove over to Grandma's house to drop off cans in the shed since Doug has been driving the truck around since November. We both went back home afterwards but I decided to get some grocery shopping done while I had some extra time. I had to scan my groceries twice because the register wasn't working. I came home, Doug helped me unload the groceries, I put them away, got in a shower, ate some popcorn and watched TV shows, logged caches and got caught up on my blog. It was nice to get those caches replaced.
Next Adventure: Bonney Lake Birthdays and Lawn Mowing's at Grandma's House
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