Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Sergeant Electric Glory

 WARNING: The following blog entry contains spoilers to the caches listed within. If you feel you may be caching in Tucson anytime soon and don't want to ruin your hunt, please proceed with caution.

We had a really nice weekend of caching. We rested on Saturday, and cached on Sunday and Monday (Martin Luther King Day). Here's our Sunday adventure.


A couple weeks ago, we searched for this cache (last entry on the page) and did not find it (DNF). It appeared as if we came from the wrong direction, since there were fences in the way. We resolved to come at it from a different direction. Take a look at the picture below. The red trail shows our path from the car to the fence (dead end!) when we first looked for this in the beginning of this month. The trail in blue illustrates the easiest and quickest way to the cache. The trail in purple shows the way we ended up going. The cache in the middle of the map is the 123 Book Exchange cache, and the one to the far right is the Goes to Eleven cache. More on those in my next entry.


We parked by a medical building, and we headed southeast from there. We ran into a fence.


We soon found a gap in the fence.


I had no worries since I saw a couple other people walking around in there. We came across a huge crater. It looked like a wash that was deteriorating. We went around that in a large crescent.

 It may be hard to make out, but the land opens up at about the middle of the picture.

 Wrong way, kids!

We then came to a small concrete wash. We got across that without any difficulty. The angle was only about 150 degrees. We just ran down and then back up.

This can be confusing to look at. You're looking down into the concrete wash. There is graffiti on the far wall, and a fence goes over the wash to the right.
 
 Sarah just had to prove that she could climb along the fence. What a fence monkey!

We got near the cache, only to find a fence in our path. Down about 300 feet, there was a gap in the fence. We crossed it, doubled back, and soon after, found the cache. We took a tiny plastic helmet, a plastic fish toy, and this suction-cup ball thingie. We left some kind of red monster toy (I was told it was from the Hercules cartoon), a duck hockey player with wheels (McD's Happy Meal item, boy I love trying to describe these things, lol), and a hippo toy from Madagascar that will probably talk to whoever handles the cache next, so keep your ears open! Ha ha! Interestingly enough, we found our way back much easier (the trail in blue on the map above). I figured out the way we were supposed to go... southwest from the car, not southeast!

Savannah and Sarah with their loot. The fishie was for Skylar.

Me with the cache container and my trusty GPSr.

Upon heading back to our automobile, we found the easy route. I almost fell down when I saw our car... right there, on the other side of the parking lot!

"You've gotta be kidding me!"

This was a fun walk for my two older daughters and I (the other two Tucson Terrors had stayed home). There were plenty of gulleys and hills. The walk was more enjoyable going the way we did. The kids wanted to go back that way anyway, but I wanted to hit two more caches and it was getting late.


This is one of a bunch of caches named after the enlisted ranks of the US Air Force. This one was a "park and grab." It was literally just that: We parked, and we grabbed. Sarah headed toward this cool-looking tree and scurried up. The cache happened to be in that very tree! We found a few tiny items inside, but we took nothing and left nothing.

Sarah and Savannah right near the cache location.

Me with the cache.

Here are two dogs that were barking incessantly as we were seeking the cache. After I took this photo, they seemed to quiet down. I guess they just wanted their picture taken!


We had a bit of trouble getting to ground zero on this one. I thought it was on the west side of the road, but then it looked to be on the other side. I parked in an apartment complex on the east side, and then found we had to cross to the west side after all! It took us awhile to find this one. It was up high, hanging on the inside of the pole that Sarah's standing in front of in the picture below. It was hanging by what looked to be a straightened-out paperclip, similar to the Kodak Cache (second to last entry), one of our first finds. Sarah found this one, and in fact, she found all the caches today, three for three!

The cache stated that this is "another fine example of our national symbol of freedom," but I saw no symbol of freedom here. Just a tiny tube with a log sheet inside.

She loves bubble gum and geocaching!

It's dark! Time to go home and make dinner.

Stay tuned for our holiday adventure. Thanks for reading!

4 comments:

~Chickahominy said...

You win the prize for persevering to get to the cache! It looks like y'all are really enjoying the hunt.

Amy K. said...

Thanks, ~Chicka (or ~Chick?)! We had a lot of fun. :)

Erika Jean said...

The last one is a "bison tube".

Amy K. said...

Correct! I think that's our first bison micro. All the others were either Altoid mini's or film canisters. :)