Caching up!

Took some time off this week and went on a long needed solo geocaching trip. I hit some of the more difficult caches where you can't take children. The University Of West Florida in Pensacola has some wonderful bike and hike trails that hide a nice selection of geocaches! It was half swamp trail, half dry land. Lots of bridges...watch out for alligators!

Off I go in the Scout (my geo-jeep). I stopped by a few geocaches on campus that were not on the trail. The first too right off were soaked! One of the containers was one of those zip-loc throw away containers. The lid was off and the container was cracked. Everything inside was soggy and starting to mold. I scribbled my name on the water-logged log and moved on to the trails.

It was pretty hot for 9am. The humidity was pretty high and the sun was relentless. On to the first cache in the trails. About 3/4 of a mile away. I get to the general area and pick up my GPS and see my range accuracy was skipping between 20 and 50 feet. I get as good as 5 feet accuracy with no clouds, no trees, but tt was thick woods and knew this was going to be a tough one. Not to worry, I brought my map with the clues and.... um... where's my map? I lost my map on the way down. My bag must have knocked it out of my back pocket. I had to find this one on my own. I remembered reading that two of the caches where under palmettos. So I took a chance and started looking for the mini palms. Sure enough, there it was hidden under some dead palm leaves.

Logged it and on to the next! On the way, I noticed the trails had little name tags like Coke Can, The Gorge, Tree Hugger. and I noticed the bugs! The bugs were really, er... bugging me! They kept buzzing my head: flying into my ears, running into my head, just insane! Bug spray didn't even keep them away. The entire time on the trails, these flies were on me. They never did bite... just buzzed me!

I drank a lot of water as you can imagine. By the time I finished the first part of the trails, I was soaked from head to toe in sweat! As fast as I was drinking, I was sweating it. Kinda gross, but I loved it!

There were 15 geocaches on my list to get. Thunder and lighting stopped me at 9. A new one day find record for me. Dispite the soggy logs, bugs, heat, sweat. I had a blast!

Oh... and on my way out of the trail, a 12 year old kid and his dad past by and said, "did you see the gator?" The kid said they were off to feed it. Glad it didn't feed on me today!

And I found my map too!