Caching In

A most satisfying weekend, though it included some slight physical injury. Peg and I went up to my old hometown in Virginia and stayed at my friend Lynn Pritchett's guesthouse in uptown Martinsville. Beautiful old house, and we pretty much had the run of the place. Peg got the best therapeutic massage of her life, and I went out geocaching. Had some luck, as the photo to the right shows: found a cache hidden off a neat little trail through town, known as the Rail Trail, which runs along old, disused rail beds and will eventually become part of a long trail between Martinsville up to Philpott Lake (where we have done some excellent camping). I placed a copy of my novel, Balak, for some lucky geocacher, though I suspect that if he or she reads it, they may end up never wanting to find another cache.

Peg and I had an excellent dinner (seafood linguini for me) at Rania's restaurant and retired fairly late in a huge and very comfortable bed in the house's most opulent guest room. I'm pretty certain the house is haunted, but after the late dinner and accompanying martinis, I was too laid back to go investigate the rappings in the spooky old attic.

Still, I got up at the crack of dawn this morning and headed out geocaching again, this time at the city park, where a small cache is hidden. Alas, this time, no luck; I found the precise location with no problem, but there's about four feet of old, dead leaves piled around there, and whilst digging about, my bum leg bummed out on me, as it's been known to do from time to time. The tendon in my left knee seems to go nonexistent, my leg bends at a sideways angle, and down I go. In this case, I went down hard, and I had a pretty good, half-mile limp back to the guest house. I'm treating it now with an ace bandage and a hard martini, and I think it's beginning to work. (Getting up and down the stairs without spilling the martini, I will confess, is a bear.)

After my tumble, Peg and I had lunch with my mom, and then we retired back to the old homestead, where the electricity promptly went dead for a couple of hours as winds hit 50-60 mph and made a mess of the woods behind the house. Fortunately, the tree that fell just above the driveway missed my car, but it wasn't by much...

Back home now, and tomorrow's another friggin' work day, but I'm thinking another medicinal martini really might be in order.