Packing and Geocaching

What a great weekend! We went bike riding for about 10 miles along Buffalo Bayou in Tracey Hershey Park. We took our time and made frequent stops to hunt for hidden geocache sites in the woods along the bayou. I actually startled a little brown bunny in the brush, who must have been getting an early start hiding his Easter Eggs.

Saturday we packed up everything in the kitchen that I think we can live without until we get settled in Costa Rica. Later in the evening, we went to a dinner party to celebrate our friend Susan's birthday. The conversation turned to our geocaching adventure the day before and a couple of the party guests became very intrigued with our hobby. We agreed to meet with them and introduce them geocaching. Instead of an Easter Egg Hunt, we spend a couple hours with Tammy and Danielle teaching them the techniques and tools of a geocacher. They're hooked and they are already making plans to go with us again in 3 weeks.

We will be meeting with the realtor later today and putting the house up for sale. We spent a good part of the weekend staging rooms for showing to potential buyers and packing more of our stuff for the move. We keep moving stuff into the garage and it is getting hard to move around all the boxes we've crammed in there. I sure hope a 40' sea container is going to be big enough to hold everything we plan on taking with us.

Donald and Wendy drove over from Alabama a couple of weeks ago and loaded up a U-Haul truck full of furniture and stuff as part of our down-sizing project. It was great to spend time with them.
Read the whole story...

Camping in North Central Texas

Early last week we checked the weather report and it looked like we would have a great weekend so we booked a campsite in Liberty Hill Park on Navarro Mills Lake, in North Central Texas. John managed to leave work early Friday afternoon and after a 3 hour drive, we were able setup the campsite long before dark. We had chicken fajitas for dinner and enjoyed a quiet evening with an audio book on the Kindle. This was just the calm before the storm...

Sometime around midnight, the storm rolled in and our little tent was rocking and rolling in the wind. If it hadn't been anchored to the vehicle, it would have blown across the field of Bluebonnets and Indian Paint Brushes, with us in it. The rain was blowing horizontally with such a force that the tent's rainfly/canopy was of little use and the rain water started coming in on us. Our dog, Randy, was NOT a happy camper!

The howl of the wind felt like a tornado so we decided we would be safer in our little Ford Escape. Going outside in the rain was not an option because it would have been impossible to unzip the tent, or open a car door, with the force of the wind. Fortunately for us, the tent is designed to attach to the back of the SUV and gives us full access to the cargo area. Can you picture us crawling into the Escape, over all of our gear and climbing into the front seats? It's a good thing we've now lost about 160 pounds between us, or we would have been calling the fire department with their "jaws of life" to pull us out.

The storm was over by about 3 AM. We were soggy, but OK. We went back to the tent and found a couple of inches of water on the floor and some wet bedding. The temperature was in the mid 50's and it was almost impossible to get warm again until sun up. We had several campers that were staying in motor-homes stop by to check on us Saturday morning. One of them told us she had heard on the news that the winds topped 75 mph!

We strung up some clothes line and hung up all the wet clothes and bedding to dry out. It was a gorgeous morning on the lake and after lunch we went geocaching with our geopup Randy. These are just a few of the hidden caches we found. As usual there are no pictures of me, because I'm usually the photographer.



Here's a picture of Randy, exhausted after geocaching. --->

After we got back from geocaching we made a nice salad and heated up some taco soup and tortillas for supper.

John went to put some of our gear back in the SUV and discovered we had a dead battery. Yours truly had managed to leave the key in the ignition, in the ON position, to charge the Blackberry batteries we had drained while geocaching. There really wasn't any way we could get a neighboring camper to jump start us. They were all anchored down in their motor-homes. We placed a call to AAA and they managed to send a rescue truck to us within the hour.

After our lack of sleep Friday evening, we turned in early Saturday for a great night's sleep. Sunday morning, after breakfast we saw a Bald Eagle floating on the thermals just overhead. That's the first time either one of us has seen a Bald Eagle outside of the Pacific Northwest. What a nice treat for us just before we packed up and took a leisurely drive back home.
Read the whole story...

IT LIVES!! (in the tall grass)

I’m not really very fond of bugs. Apart from Fluffy, my pet tarantula, I wouldn’t miss the entire class of critters that bite, sting or chew up the wooden shelves in my garage.

I do enjoy the Spanish word for them: bichos [beach’ ohs]. It just pops off the lips like an English homophone that is usually combined with a tone of venom and the words, “son of a …” Saying their name in Spanish, with the correct tone of voice, helps me get through the day. “Damn bichos!”

See?

Then again, the little nasties sometimes get to pay me back for not showing them “the love.”

On our way back to Atenas from two wonderful days in the Valley of the Quetzals, we were seized with our obsession to look for tiny boxes of hidden trinkets, worth less than a penny, using millions of dollars of Global Positioning System technology, aka, geocashing.

“Oh, look! There’s a cache showing on my GPS, right down there in that little valley! Turn down this road!” said my co-pilot.

“Aarrrrrgh!” sez I.

After 15 minutes of dropping like a rock, down into this verdant valley, my co-pilot again said, “Turn here.”

“That’s a cow path.”

“No it isn’t. There was some gravel there once and there are a few rocks here and there right now,” she retorted. Then she set the hook. “Besides, do you want to log a Did Not Find on the website?” We turned up the cow path road.

Forty-five minutes of bone-jarring single-track later, following her GPS needle, we came to a bridge over the beautiful crashing cataract of the Rio Blanco de Copey. Boy what I would have given for an ultra-light fishing rig and some trout bait.
But we were after a different quarry now – the elusive Tupperware box full of trinkets.

The online hints said that the box was hidden in a “cave near the bridge” and the GPS’s kept dragging us towards a big ol’ rock about 20 feet off the road, sitting in meter-high grass. Having planned ahead, I was wearing shorts, crocs with no socks and no Deet. Ah, but it will just take a second.

It took about 10 minutes. You have to locate the cache, get it out of the cave, open it, look through the trinkets to see if there is one you want to take, leave one of our trinkets behind and sign the log book. Through all of that time, I never felt the little monsters striking into my flesh and injecting their venom.

Pat says they’re called no-see-ums. I think in the Midwest we called them chiggers. Either way, the domestic variety is a poor excuse for their genus, considering the strength of whatever the hell it is those horrid Costa Rican cousins leave behind in your skin. The Costa Rican branch of the chigger species are the Black Mambas of chigger-dom.

Our glee at logging another cache find was soon supplanted with a need to scratch. Our legs had been attacked and we both had numerous little red “pimples” raising up and itching. It’s overwhelming. And, I’ve learned my lesson: no matter how hot and steamy it is in the jungle [hoon’ glay] thou shalt always bathe in Deet and wear long pants.

Today is 4 days later and the only way to ignore the itching is to get my mind off of it by writing dreck like this for you to suffer through. See? I like to share.

Read the whole story...

Geocaching: Costa Rica style

For those of you who we haven’t bored to tears with tales of our geocaching hobby, here’s a quick description:

Thousands of participants register at www.geocaching.com and become Geocachers. Geocache people take little containers, filled with everything from trinkets, coins and other tchotchkes, if the container is large, or just a little slip of paper to write your name and the date upon if the container is small. Then the Geocacher takes that container out in the world and hides it. (S)he takes a GPS reading on the exact hiding spot and then publishes those coordinates on the geocaching.com website. Other Goecachers then run out and try to be the first to find a new cache – or, in the case of us slower folk, just finding the durn things, period. Once found, you proudly log your find at the website. There are about 900,000 caches currently hiding, around the world. It’s addictive.

Costa Rica is a new geocaching experience, however.

In the States, thousands of caches are simply plastic 35mm film canisters, stuffed with a log sheet and shoved under the base-shroud of a shopping mall parking lot light. A little boring at times.

It seems that’s not how they do things here in Costa Rica.

Our first shot at a Costa Rican cache was supposed to be one of the most famous ones in the world. This baby is stashed in Manuel Antonio National Park, out along a jungle trail, allegedly far from the maddening crowd. We’d never been to the park, but, hey … no biggie. We’re semi-professionals.

“Where’s my back pack?”
“You left it at the house.”
“How can I carry water and “stuff”?”
“Here’s a cosmetics tote. Put some in there.”

So, we put on our protective long pants, shirts, hats and best hiking boots, grabbed two liters of water, bought our tickets into the park and headed out.

Kind of a disappointment right at the start. The “trail in the jungle” is as wide as most Costa Rican roads; and, it’s flat and nicely graded with fine gravel. On top of that, there were several large tour groups being noisily led to their great adventure by paid guides.

None of that for us! We’re world-famous wilderness explorers!

We got ahead of or behind most of the chattering Germans & Canadians & Americans and finally got to a place where the road-like trail looked like a real trail. Just dirt, roots, bugs, plants and you.

After a short time on the trail, we were sure that none of the tours seemed to be following us. Then, we came up to a very decayed, barely readable Park sign, showing the layout of the trail (a loop) and where the main attractions were along that trail, all marked and numbered. We studied the sign but couldn’t make much out due to severe jungle rot and weathering. Another tour couple came up and headed to the right side of the loop.

“We’re going left,” I declared.

Off we went into the deep rainforest jungle. No fears. The brave Pirate Juan was fully armed with 15 knives (surprised?) and, heck, the whole loop was only 2.5 kilometers. Piece of cake. Pat is in great shape, having been riding her bike 5 to 10 miles a day; and, I’m, well, “Arrrrrgh!”

Climb climb climb climb climb. Damn! Don’t these people know about the proper angle of construction for a trail, or about trail switchbacks? Climb climb. Wow, a body really works up a sweat out here in the jungle, but with 100% humidity, there isn’t much cooling-by-evaporation going on.

Fortunately, I’m wearing one of my best “Coolmax® Moisture Transport™ tee shirts which mechanically pulls the perspiration from your skin and moves it to one of your outer clothing layers, thereby keeping your skin dry and cool.” Unfortunately, my outer clothing layer was some crappy cotton button-down shirt that I grabbed out of the closet. Guess how fast Coolmax can saturate a cotton shirt?

Climb climb. Whoops. We’re over the top of that canyon and now we have to drop down to its bottom.

Drop drop drop drop drop. Huge steps down – the kind where your boot heel is almost touching your butt by the time your other toe touches the next lower trail surface.
Drop drop. Whoops. Down in the bottom. Gotta climb up the other side. Gee, didn’t these people ever hear about how to construct steps so that a normal person can negotiate them?

Climb climb climb. Whoops. Drop drop drop. Whoops. Climb climb climb.

Climb till you can’t breathe. Drop until your knees hurt. Climb. Drop. Climb. Drop.

Damn! Gimme some water. Gimme a GPS reading. Where the hell are we? Whataya mean the jungle canopy won’t let a satellite signal through? They told us that durn Garmin thingy would get a reading inside the Bat Cave even while The Joker jams the signals outside.

Ever sweated so much that your SHOES soaked through? Ever sweated so much that your wallet was so soaked through that the leather softened and your credit cards permanently debossed your name into the leather wherever they touched? Sheeeeit!

Guess how fast we both went through our liter of water, sweating that much? Think we were to the geocache yet?

Nah.

We must have looked so bad to other people we encountered (all going the other way, coming from the right side of the loop) that we convinced several of them to turn around without any explanation.

This went on for 3 hours.

Know what happens when you run out of sweat? That was just about when we reached the approximate cache site and we drank the last swallows of water. I stopped sweating. Very very bad symptom.

Pat was not quite as bad off as me (remember, she cheats by riding her bicycle back at Houston.) While I meandered around in my heat stroke daze, she tried her best to decipher the hiding place clues and get a reading through the jungle canopy on her GPS. No luck. We decided to bail.

About a (flat) hundred yards down the other side of the loop we ran into one of the tour couples.

“Is it flat this direction or is it all up and down?”
“Uh, its flat and the beach is just over there.”
“Beach?”


Another hundred flat yards of staggering and we came out into the shade behind one of the legendary Manuel Antonio beaches. Sun worshipers were frolicking in the surf. Tourists were playing with the monkeys. Fat old Germans were kicked back on their beach chairs, swilling water and eating bratwurst sandwiches (or whatever fat Germans eat.) I’d say, FUCK right here, but this is a family blog.

I plopped down on a beach bench and sloshed sweat from my saturated clothes all over the place. I think I looked pretty wonderful to the tourists. Pat must have looked pretty concerned that her “famous Pirate” was about to croak on some Park bench in the middle of the Garden of Eden for want of a drink of water. Anyhow, she was so convincing to some passers-by that they popped out a full liter of their water and gave it to me. I downed it like a fraternity kid downing a beer.

Thirty minutes later, I could walk. I got over to the cold fresh water showers (?!?) and drenched my head. I was ready to go again – as long as “again” didn’t involve any climbing.

A great first geocache in Costa Rica.

Read the whole story...

Random musings late on a Saturday night

I bit the bullet and finally committed to daily exercise of some type at least 3 days a week. In the past 2 weeks I've averaged 5-6 mile bike rides. I rode 4 days last week and 5 days this week. I even talked John into riding with me today.

Last weekend we did a little Geocaching on our way home from grandson's birthday party. Found 2 out of the 4 we went after. Today we went back to one of the caches we found on our first Geocaching adventure to replace a foreign coin we lost by accident (a coin fell out of the cache when we opened the container and disappeared in a pile of rocks.) Rule number one about Geocaching: Take what you want, but replace it with something of equal or greater value.

I must say, I'm becoming a pretty creative cook throughout this process. Last night we had chicken and veggies with a marinara sauce over penne pasta and a salad on the side. Tonight it was grilled pork brisket and grilled zucchini with herb roasted onion and potato wedges.... Total calories: 393, including the cup of 1% milk. Tomorrow night... Scallops in a white wine sauce over whole wheat linguini. If I had the money, I'd open a restaurant for folks wanting to eat really great food and still stay on a healthy nutrition plan.

We are planning our next trip to Costa Rica the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and we'll be returning on December 6th. We can't wait for our Tico family to see how much weight we've lost since our April trip.
Read the whole story...

Our Unique Wedding Anniversary Gift

We decided to give ourselves a unique wedding anniversary gift this year and take up geocaching as a way to get out and get more exercise. So, yesterday we bought a GPSr and we went out on our hunt this afternoon.

We found 3 out of the 4 caches we went after. Not too bad for a couple of newbies. There are only 886,668 more for us to find.

You can get info about geocaching at this link Geocaching

We still plan to go out and share a romantic meal at our favorite French Bistro later this week and then we can go geocaching next weekend to work off the extra calories.

This is going to a great way to burn calories and stay fit. We can do this biking, hiking and walking together anywhere in the world.
Read the whole story...