Anyway, I got an email last night at 10:45 from the geocaching.com computer, notifying me that there was a new geocache hidden along the trails of The Wild Center, a nearby natural history museum...I thought that it would be a fun walk for a spring morning, and that we would likely be the FTFers...
When we got to the Wild Center, the Little Old Lady greeting people at the door saw our attire (boots and geo-pack) and preemptively informed us that all of the trails were closed due to ice...I asked her to expand on her warning a bit, and she had lots of dire details about pack-ice caused by snow-shoeing people and our springtime warm-day-cold-night syndrome, and was told in no uncertain terms that the ice was like a sheet of glass (but wet and hard and with pokey-things sticking up in places)...
We were bummed out, but had some fun poking around the museum for a bit...there's a live otter, and other exhibits with live beasties and stuff to touch and smell and play with...but when push came to shove, we decided to try our luck and chance the consequences (figuring that we could always turn back before the outing reached Donner Party stage)...
It was certainly slippery in a couple of spots, but the Little Old Lady at the front door (and whoever printed the dire warnings in the daily museum activities flyer we were handed on our way in) operates using an entirely different formula for risk assessment than geocachers do...it was fine...
It was a lovely walk on a lovely day through a mix of forest types and down, eventually, to the Raquette River...on the way we saw deer prints aplenty, as well as some other tracks that looked like fox...
There was a cool set of boardwalks towards the end that took us over marshy ground to the hiding spot of the geocache and some wonderful observation platforms that projected out above an oxbow of the Raquette...
We found the cache in short order, and found that some friends of ours, Shane and Doree, had gotten there before us...we suspect an incursion under cover of darkness with headlamps and ninja suits and dramatic music...we inspected the cache contents, made our trades, signed the log, and replaced the cache in its hiding spot before enjoying a snack and drink in the sun on the observation deck...
We pose for geo-photos be saying, "Geocache" instead of cheese, and Ben sometimes gives the camera a battle face...this was one of those times...we enjoyed granola bars and raisins and warm water (in the winter, I fill my camelbag with hot water to prevent the tube from freezing...it wasn't really necessary today, but my habits don't shift as quickly as the seasons up here in the ADKs)...
On the way back up we saw a great tree with numerous huge holes made by a pileated woodpecker and now overgrown (ingrown) with moss...we made it back to our car alive, drove into Tupper Lake proper for a lunch at McDonald's, and stopped at Shaheen's on the way out of town for a large piece of beautiful cow-flesh for dinner...Ben's taking a nap, I'm on Spring Break for 2 weeks, I'll be heading West in a couple of days to wallow in turpitude of some sort in Las Vegas with my sister, and I may go do some maintenance on a couple of my nearby geocaches this afternoon while the weather holds...it's supposed to turn rainy and grey tomorrow...
Warning: Topic Shift...stop reading now if you don't want to know what we did last night...
Yesterday afternoon, I began my Spring Break with a precision strike on 3 geocaches...one that had been taunting me from under the snow for a while, and 2 that were brand new and picking at my competitive nerve endings...I found them all (YAY!!!) and made it home in time to pick Ben up from school at the normal time...when Gail got home, she proposed going out for supper to Desperadoes, the superb mexican place in Lake Placid...I one-upped her by adding a movie to the evening ("Meet the Robinsons")...the movie theater in Lake Placid, the Palace Theater, is a great old building where you pay $6 for a movie ticket, and can get a tub of popcorn for 75 cents...
We all had a great evening overall, and great food at dinner, and Ben enjoyed the movie (it had its moments, but all things being equal, I would rather have had sand in my eyes for the entire 90 minutes)...on the way back to the car, we walked to Starbucks (new last year, and the only one in 60 miles) for big and fancy coffees to end the evening...
So far, it's been a great weekend!
No comments:
Post a Comment