Again with the Jabberwock!

It's not just ugly tree — that is photobombing UGLY tree!

Too long it has been since Old Rob and I took a wee trip out of town to hunt geocaches, so since I was off work today, Old Rob and I took a wee trip out of town to hunt geocaches. The Lake Crabtree area, near Cary, NC, was our destination, for there one can find a plethora of trails and caches... or, as in a couple of instances for us, just trails.

Old man can't find geocache, commiserates
with ugly tree

We started out on a sour note, or two — a couple of long, ill-fated hunts, effectively tiring out the old men before we could even get started. Once we got moving on down the trail, though, the fairly rugged terrain tired us out even more. I had on relatively new boots that were still stiff, so my feet called me names for a while. And then...

Have you ever been bitten by a honey locust tree? Mother of Yog, these are evil trees. I described an encounter with a honey locust tree some time ago, here. I had another one today. Didn't even know the rotten bastard was lying in wait for me. At one point during a short bushwhack, I pushed my way through some spindly limbs blocking my passage, and as one of them whipped back toward me, it planted a two-inch long, molten hot spike in my leg.

Ask Old Bloody Rob whether I hollered. I might have hollered. I might have hollered ugly words. I don't know, I was too busy hollering. After a healthy round of hollering, I worked up my nerve and tugged the nasty little spike out of my leg and called it mean names. I'm pretty sure it came out cleanly, without leaving little fragments of itself lurking somewhere in my flesh (I should very much like to think the damned thing would have done nothing that hateful). Rob is the one who always says that, when geocaching, if you don't bleed you're not having fun. Today, at least one of us had fun.

We did find a fair number of fun little hides in the woods, so our day was tiring and painful but ultimately satisfying. At one point, I found an ugly tree with an even uglier head (see photo above), but there was no cache there. There should have been a cache there, as it was a pretty neat ugly tree. We didn't add a vast number of finds to our respective tallies — seven altogether; my find count now stands at 9,812 — but we had gone out looking to get some exercise, and I can tell you, some exercise we done got.

I sleep now.

A troll in the Upside-Down

Crabtree Creek to the north, with I-40 in the distance

Crabtree Creek to the south, with some dude wandering about in the water