To read series from Day 1, click HERE
Oh my! What a day that was. We had planned to cache six miles of the West Penn Trail before lunch and then hit six miles of the Ghost Town Trail until the sun set. That is not what happened.
Our day began at 6:45 at McD's for a quick fuel filled breakfast. We dropped off the first car at one end of the planned six miles and both of us jumped in the second cache-car to head to the other end of our charted course. We parked the car and jumped out ready to hit the trail. We could still see the car from the first cache hide. We climbed over rocks, crawled over fallen trees, and hunted for close to an hour. We started our day with a DNF (did not find).
Our next cache was tough. We search for 30 minutes. Almost calling a second DNF, we glanced up and there it was hanging on a branch in a tree. Hooray! We were rolling now. After two and a half hours on the trail we had 3 finds and 2 DNFs, and we had barely hiked 2 miles.
On our 8th cache, the trail was swampy on both sides. Our GPS pointed the way to the cache was up the hill to the side of the trail. A two-foot pool of murky water stood between the trail and the hill. Not to be stopped in the midst of the hunt, I volunteered to jump over and retreive the find. I took two steps back and took a short running leap and ...
SPLASH! My take off spot was not the solid land I thought it was. As I jumped, my foot sank into the soft, moist dirt which took the energy away from my forward progress. I landed two inches from solid ground, sinking into the black muck up to my knee, splashing water up to my hip. My arm also got wet from wrist to shoulder as I caught myself. My second foot did hit terra firma. So only I was only half wet.
How did my friend, my geocaching buddy, respond? Laughter gurgled from her. Before you could say "mud", we were both laughing so hard tears flowed. Then, she looked ten feet down the trail and saw a solid road to the hillside we needed to search. More laughter. We did make that find - her dry and me soaking half wet. (I did dry off as the search continued.)
We hiked and searched and climbed and slid. At 2:00pm we were no where near the car and we had only a couple cookies and a granola bar since breakfast oh so many hours ago. I found some and she found some, we didn't keep track of who found how many. At the end of the trail, when we finally made it back to the first car, we had logged 7 miles (thanks to a couple of bunny trails) and 40 caches (only a total of 3 DNFs). It was a record day for both of us. We went and ate supper, then I dropped her off at her car and we both went home to shower (I might have had a bit more mud than she did) and collapse into bed.
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| Smily faces are the finds! |
We will get to the second part of our plan on another caching adventure day. There are many, many more caches out there to find. And next time, she will be the one to jump.
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