June 22, 2016

• Life, etc.

  It's been an eventful few days, with more eventfulness on the horizon. Joyouswind and I wanted to spend Father's Day with Bookmark61, so we left Michigan on Saturday morning, headed east and Brett left Delaware around the same time, headed west. I suspect Brett had the more interesting drive across Maryland and Pennsylvania. Krysten and I were mostly limited to the Ohio Turnpike. Bleh. We met up in Youngstown, Ohio, about as close to Pennsylvania as it's possible to get without actually being in Pennsylvania.

  Krysten and I took a couple of detours along the way. We didn't go straight for the toll road, but took a small rural highway across southern Michigan at the beginning of our trip. We stopped in White Pigeon, Michigan to find a geocache where I could leave a couple of Travel Bugs, one of which was trying to get to Detroit. This awesome cache seemed like a good place to leave them.

  

  It sits outside a cement factory and was built by the owner of the factory. The door is made of metal bars and is kept padlocked. There are clues to the combination of the padlock on the cache page, involving adding and subtracting numbers from a date etched onto the concrete floor. Inside the miniature tower is a large ammo can geocache sitting on a shelf. While Krysten was trying to get the combination right, a man came running out of the business shouting, "What are you doing here?" He startled Krysten, but I just laughed and replied, "We're trying to do math and failing." I correctly assumed he was the owner of the geocache (and the business). We had a nice conversation while Krysten got the door opened.

  From White Pigeon, we drove down to the Indiana Toll Road, taking it a few miles to where it ended at the state line and became the Ohio Turnpike. We stayed on the turnpike until about ten miles west of Toledo where we took another detour to Oak Openings Preserve to find the oldest geocache in Ohio. It was very hot, but there was very little underbrush, the bugs weren't too bad, and the trail was wide and clear. We hiked in on a fire road and intersected a horse trail, which we followed to within 20 feet of the cache. It was a very pleasant hike in a beautiful little forest.

  

  I have sweaty hat hair in this photo. Krysten got silly with a roll of dog poop bags she found in the cache.

  After this cache, we had to get serious about getting to the other side of Ohio. Well, I had to get serious... Krysten apparently had to catch up on her sleep. Brett beat us to Youngstown by a couple of hours. He helped us carry our stuff into the hotel room and opened his Father's Day gifts, then we walked down the road to a Ruby Tuesday for dinner. After eating, we walked back to the hotel, put on our swimsuits and spent some time playing in the pool before calling it a day.

  The next morning we checked out of the hotel and went geocaching. I had four caches on my list and we found three of them, including one that the last signature on the log was four years ago. That one was in a little nature preserve. The one we didn't find should have been in the same nature preserve, but it also hadn't been found in four years and had several DNFs logged on the cache page so I'm pretty sure it's gone missing. We found the caches so quickly, we were left with about three hours to kill, so we found a nearby theater and watched Finding Dory. Cute movie and the scene at the end with the truck was very funny.  After the movie, we went back to the nature preserve for a tailgate picnic in the little parking area, a family selfie to commemorate the day, and then it was time to say goodbye and go our separate ways.

  

  The drive home seemed to take a lot longer than the drive east, but I think it was just more boring because we didn't make any fun geocaching detours. We did get off the turnpike to grab some fast food drive-thru for supper and stayed on the back roads of western Ohio while we ate. That was a nice interlude; back roads are always more interesting than interstate driving. We got back on I-80 in the little stretch that's not toll, sort of a no-man's land between the westernmost toll booth in Ohio and the easternmost toll booth in Indiana. We rolled into The 'Duh around 8 PM - way too late to spring the dogs from the kennel where we'd boarded them. Krysten helped me unload the van, loaded her stuff into her car and took off for her apartment. The weekend was over.

  The next morning, I picked up the dogs and dropped Jack off at Krysten's apartment. He likes to hang out on the balcony, so I left the sliding glass door opened wide enough for him to go in and out, gave him a treat and left. Boo was exhausted after two days of hard play with other dogs and passed out in his doggy bed while I was busy on my laptop logging the geocaches we'd found over the weekend. At some point I realized it was getting dark. A few minutes later, I heard a rumble of thunder and noticed that Boo was getting agitated. My mind flashed to that open balcony door at Krysten's apartment, and Jack free to roam out into the rain and back onto Krysten's furniture. As I was putting on my shoes, the rain started falling and the power went off for a moment. By the time I'd put on a jacket and grabbed my keys, the wind had picked up. About the time I stepped onto the back porch, the rain became a deluge and the wind became a gale. I sprinted for the van, slammed the door shut and looked up just in time to see our canopy and metal frame tumbling through the backyard headed right for the driveway and my van. I started the engine and was about to back further down the driveway when the canopy stopped just before reaching the driveway. Whew!

  

  I could barely see when I backed out of my driveway, but by the time I'd driven four blocks to the edge of the village, the storm was nearly over. When I got to Krysten's apartment, the sun was shining and Jack was chillin' on the couch completely unconcerned with the weather. It seems The 'Duh got the brunt of the storm. I took Jack outside to pee, back up to the apartment, gave him a treat, closed the balcony door and went home. And that's when I discovered that when the power blinked, one of the silver maples in our backyard had been struck by lightning and a large limb was down in our side lot.

  

  Our neighbors on the other side of the lot came to my rescue that evening, cutting the limb into smaller pieces and stacking them near the street, and twisting our canopy frame back into shape and putting it back over the patio.

  

  I removed the canopy from the frame and haven't put it back on yet. There's more severe weather in the forecast for tonight - no sense in risking a repeat performance.

  So, other than weekend road trips, geocaching and storm cleanup, I've been making some preparations for the big road trip to Denver for GeoWoodstock. I'll have to do the Michigan to Kansas stage by myself. Brett is flying from Philadelphia to Kansas City and I'll pick him up at the airport and we'll drive the rest of the way together. We'll be meeting up with murisopsis and Old Dog Sparky in Denver for a frenzy of geocaching and events.

  I've also been trying to keep up with the cherries. I can't reach the tops of the trees anymore, so the birds will be feasting on those cherries.

  

  I'm picking, rinsing, pitting and flash freezing. After GeoWoodstock, I'll be making jam. The raspberries are beginning to turn red, so I'll be busy picking them a couple of times a day after I get home. I'll be going from a frenzy of geocaching to a frenzy of picking and jamming.

  And now you are caught up.

  • 10:23 am
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