Spring Geocaching Outing

My geocaching account is setup to send me an email whenever a new geocache is approved within 50 miles of my home coordinates, I like fresh geocaches...I found 3 new ones yesterday, 2 of them I was the "First-to-Find" (FTF)...Part of it is competitive, but another part is the added challenge of finding a geocache that nobody else has been to before...your not 100% sure that it's there, that the coords are accurate, there's no herd path leading you to the cache, etc.

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!

St. Paddy's Day Snowstorm...

Snow...snow, snow, snow, snow...

We got about 10" of new snow overnight at out place, and Ben and I went out to play during one of the lulls in the ongoing snow that has been falling on and off all day...

The snow is fun for playing, but lousy for snowballs or snowmen...Ben tried to play the game we were playing last time we went out in the snow, where he would surprise me by throwing a snowball at my back...this stuff was so light and fluffy that I couldn't feel it hitting my back...

Our plow-king had just come by, so we had huge piles of the stuff for me to throw him into (continued agoge training)...one time I hurled him from about 6-8 feet away, and he disappeared momentarily in a cloud of fluff...I was worried that he might have fallen through to hard stuff underneath, or gotten scared, but he just laughed and dug himself out, wiping the powder off of his face...

He asked me to bury him in the snow, with results that you can see below...given the loft of the snow, and it's dryness, he was really quite warm under a thick insulating layer of fun...

Agoge in Lake Clear

Gail and I went out last night for dinner and a movie in Lake Placid!!! Ben was so excited to see his babysitter that he couldn't wait for us to leave...

We enjoyed a nice dinner at the Steak and Seafood place, and then went to see "300" a great movie about the Battle of Thermopylae in Ancient Greece. In the movie, King Leonidas of Sparta blocked the only road through which the massive army of Xerxes could pass...300 Spartans held off an army led by King Xerxes numbering in the hundreds of thousands (including, according to the movie, lots of ninjas and mutant giants)...

One of the things that made the Spartans so tough was the Agoge, a rigorous and gruelling training/toughening regimen which involved taking young boys from their families at a young age, and subjecting them to all sorts of harsh training and discipline to shape them into hoplite soldiers...

This afternoon, I decided that Ben has lived much too soft a life, and decided to bring a little agoge into life in Lake Clear...



Above, you can see the young King Leonidas being lead away from his family at age 7...


I'd miss Ben if strangers in togas led him away, so instead, I threw him into a snowbank to get things started...


Next he was banished to the bottom of a steep hill, and I hurled snowballs at him from the top, teaching him important lessons about ducking and weaving and the advantages of holding the high ground...


Despite facing superior forces, as had the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, Ben rallied to return fire, and held his ground...


Here Ben can be seen trying to take advantage of natural cover to avoid overwhelming force from the sky...when I threatened to blot out the sun with my snowballs, Ben responded, "so much the better, I shall fight in the shade", as did Dienekes, a Spartan soldier when told about how numerous the Persian arrows would be in a similar strategic situation while at Thermopylae...


Ben had to face a final challenge during his experience at the bottom of Snowhill...the dark hound...luckily he knew that Zeke simply wanted to eat one of the snowballs that we were whipping back and forth at nearly light speed...


King Leonidas faced a similar challenge during his agoge, except that his snowy showdown with a large black canine ended with a really sharp stick, instead of a snowball, inside the beast's mouth...


Having conquered the beast, Ben was allowed to rejoin Lake Clear society, having successfully completed his agoge...he had suffered in the extreme, but it was certainly a different Benjamin who climbed out of that snow-pit of heck...


Before we went back inside, he used his newly acquired, battle-hardened, adversity-honed, strategic skills...as I would find out a few seconds later, he had a snowball hidden behind his back, and tricked me with the old, "look Daddy, something shiny"...I fell for it like a ton of bricks, and paid the ultimate price with a chilly neck...

Full day at Pisgah

We headed over to Mt. Pisgah this morning at 10am, and skied until 3:30pm...I stopped counting how many runs we did in the mid 20s...Ben did a great job: on the mountain, making turns, stopping, riding the T-bar, falling and getting up, waiting in line, etc.



We started off skiing by turns, I'd go about 20 yards, then he'd ski down to me, then I would ski down a little further...


After a while, we switched things up a bit, and would take turns chasing each other down the hill in big sweeping turns...


He had a great time, and told me whenever we needed to take a break...


We skied all over the bottom half of the mountain, riding up to the 3rd pylon on the T-bar before letting go...


He fell down a bunch of times, and kept getting up in good spirits...


We had fun talking to the lift-guys, some students from Lake Placid who knew me, and random friendlies who thought Ben was a cutie...


The T-bar was a blast, and it was gorgeous day for these little breaks between our runs...it was 20-something degrees, clear blue sky, and not a bit of wind...in other words, perfect...we'd watch and talk about the people skiing and snowboarding down the hill around us while leaning back into the T-bar...


Daddy got some stares for his tiny snow-blades, but they're lots of fun, light as air, and fit easily in the back of my car...


Here you can see Ben turning to bleed off some excess speed at the bottom of a fast run...sometimes he didn't practice his turns just so that he could go fast...


This great shot was taken by Gail, and you can see the snow still flying from his hi-speed impact with the ground...he was fine, and the next 3 pictures show him climbing to his feet by himself...something he did a number of times during the day...






A little snowy, but none the worse for wear...


I love this last shot as it shows him leaning into a hi-speed turn at the bottom of the hill as he finished up near Mommy...special thanks to Mommy, who came with us despite having a metric ton of work to do (for her doctoral program)...she helped us get going, set up a satellite-office in the lodge, and kept shuttling out to cheer us on!!!

Presidents' Day with Ben and Monsters

Ben and I celebrated Presidents' Day in the traditional way...we hid from the cold morning (-18), went to a new McDonald's for lunch, and then enjoyed Disney on Ice, Monster's Inc. style...


The new McDonald's in Lake Placid is a dream in tile and stainless steel...there were about 25 people milling around in the kitchen in starched uniforms, seemingly busy, yet our food took 4 seconds short of forever...


From lunch we went to ORDA, and into the 1980 Arena for the skate-tastic monster-palooza...Ben perused the various gifts and foodstuffs available, and settled on the hardhat and cotton candy combo-pack...probably the best choice...


Before the show started we snuck up to the cheap seats in the Upper Deck...benches in hard and cracky yellow plastic...we preferred our ice-side seats, but the view from above was nice...


The show started off with some familiar Disney characters refreshing the kids' memories about Monsters Inc. and the power of screams...there were 2 howler monkeys dressed like 4 year old girls sitting behind us who could bend light and shatter stone with the power of their voices alone...we were glad when the noise-inducing introduction was finished...


The show itself progressed nicely once it got going, based loosely on the movie, with some added song and ice-dance numbers thrown in to match the venue...


At intermission, we got up to stretch and walk about a bit, and Ben and I split a pretzel and some lemonade...while we were eating, he liked sitting down in a randomly placed folding chair and watching the frenzied mom's and tinies waiting in line with growing antsiness (you can see some of them reflected in the art-house quality image below)...strangely (sadly...), the line to the mens' room was short and fast and essentially kid free...


The second half of the show was as fun as the first...Ben has no stage whisper...he leans over and loudly asks stuff like, "Are those monsters real Daddy, they look real...", and, "Those girls hurt my ears Daddy!", and, "Can we stop for Subs on the way home Daddy?"...He was fascinated by the special effects, especially by the snow-makers in the banishment scene...the hula dancers (you didn't miss that part of the movie, it was added for the ice-show) were engaging enough that he got off of my lap briefly to try and hula in front of our seats (we were in row "A", so had nobody directly in front of us.)...


We both loved the door effects at the climax of the show, with doors spinning every which way on the ice, whirling through the air, and dancers cartwheeling all over the place...



The CDA (Child Detection Agency) scene was expanded as compared to the movie, but was lots of fun...all in all, we had a great time...


We laughed, we cried...it was better than CATS!!!