This morning I wrote about geocaching. Now that everyone knows what that is, I can tell some funny and not so funny stories about our geocaching adventures. About five years ago, we went on a trip in Eastern Washington which was planned to finish out the "Washington DeLorme Challenge". Our son was at Boy Scout camp and we were free to wander the state for a week. So we packed up our Pug, the late great WonderPug Scout, and headed east in the middle of August.
First let me explain the DeLorme challenge. DeLorme is the name of one of the large state map books. I know you've all seen them. They're approximately, 18x24 inches, and have about 100-150 pages of maps representing the state the book is about. Even in this day of GPSs they are a great help to travelers who have learned not to become too dependent on their device. The DeLorme challenge is to get a cache in every section of the state covered by a page in the book. There are DeLorme challenges for several states and we were determined to make Washington's ours on this trip. We didn't. We missed a page and had to take another trip, but that's a different story.
For those of you that don't know the area, Seattle may be wet and rainy, but Eastern Washington is desert and in the middle of August it is hot! We have a thermometer in our car and this is the only time it was ever consistently in triple digits. Poor little Scout usually rode in the back seat, but on this trip he rode on my lap so the air conditioner was blowing directly on him. When we would stop near a creek, something that happened a lot in that part of the world, Scout would walk in and just stand in it. He was a very hot puppy. We became very adept at finding ways to avoid leaving him in the car even for a minute. We would buy lunch at Safeway early in the morning so that we could picnic, then wait until the heat of the day was over or get permission to leave him in our hotel room when we went to dinner.
The heat notwithstanding, the trip was going fine until the third day. That's when a problem occurred when we went to find the one cache available in one particular page. We followed our GPS's directions into a National Forest and soon were completely turned around. We got to within a mile of the cache, but it was on the other side of a barrier and it was obvious we were in the wrong place. After driving around trying to find a better way in, we realized we weren't going to be able to do this cache. Reluctantly, we decided to give it up. That's when we realized we were totally lost. The GPS didn't know where we were. We didn't know where we were. Our cell phones had no signal. We weren't going to be missed until it was time to pick up our son in five days. This was not one of our smarter moves. We drove up and down roads, disagreeing about which ones we'd been on before. We saw no one except for some cows that were running free range within the forest. We were both beginning to get frightened. Fortunately, my husband remembered a feature on the GPS called "breadcrumbs" which shows a line where we've been. He turned that on and we were eventually able to follow it out of the forest.
Once we were out on the main road again, we read the cache page more carefully and found that it had directions to within a couple hundred feet of the cache. Feeling foolish for not having read the page more carefully to begin with, we followed the directions and managed to get to the cache site. It took us another forty minutes to find the cache and we were about to give up again when I managed to turn it up. I got a steak dinner out of that. My husband was very grateful that we managed to find the only cache on that page.
My steak dinner had to wait though. By the time we got to our hotel that night, the little one horse town had closed down. The only place that was open was an Arby's. That's okay, by that time we were pretty hungry. We learned a few things that day. We're still not as careful as we should be, but we make sure our phone is working and our breadcrumbs are on and my husband usually leaves where we're going on his computer.
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