Half-Past Fun in the Woods

Hmm, yes that does look a little bit like an old fart in a tree. I reckon he is — old, I mean. Yesterday was another flippin' birthday, and I swear I just had one of those a couple of weeks back. It was kind of an odd one; a little weird, I guess, what with it falling in the middle of a pandemic. Still, in all, it turned out to be very pleasant, mostly relaxing. On Friday, Ms. B. and I journeyed to Martinsville, set ourselves up at the Homestead, and picked up some dinner (burgers fantastique) from Third Bay Cafe, our favorite Martinsville restaurant. Then we settled in with some wine and watched Europa Report, which we had seen a few years back, but we both enjoyed it and wanted to see it again. It holds up nicely.

We headed on back to Greensboro yesterday afternoon, and then, last night, got a nice dinner from Fuji Sushi. Since being mostly homebound these past few weeks, I have sure been missing the sushi, so it was great to be able to bring home some of the good stuff. For the rest of the evening, being in the Japanese spirit and all, we put on three of the Ju-on movies, which I have always liked a lot — Ju-on: The Curse, pts. 1 and 2 (the original made-for-TV chapters from 2000) and the theatrical feature, Ju-on: The Grudge, from 2002. That put us late into the night, but it sure made for a pleasant birthday evening.

A couple of new geocaches at the Richardson-Taylor Preserve, placed by friend Skyhawk63 (a.k.a. Tom), were published this weekend, so this morning, friends Robgso (a.k.a. Old Rob) and Ms. Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie) met at the trailhead, spread ourselves out nicely, and hiked out to the new one called "Fun in the Woods" (GC8PWW0) A few previous hunters had posted DNF (Did Not Find) logs, so we hoped we might manage the first-to-find honors. We hunted high, low, over, under, and everywhere in between, but we couldn't turn the up the damned thing. After an hour or so, we decided to move on to a couple of other targets. One of them was my own cache, "Alien Artillery #2" (GC8PVCV) which resides a little ways up in a tree. Now, friend Rob is not a tree climber (which is due less to his own lack of desire or proficiency than a profound fear of his wife should she learn he climbed a tree), so I volunteered to go up and grab the log for him. Happily, unlike on my first ascent when I hid the cache (see "Alien Artillery," April 26, 2020), I did not fall out of the tree.

After this, we parted ways with Rob and returned to the site of "Fun in the Woods," where we came upon a geocacher I'd not met before, namely MetsFanNC. We joined forces and hunted, hunted, and hunted (again), still to come up empty-handed after well over an hour. Sigh!

Well, a DNF gives me a reason to take another trail hike, which I'll no doubt do this week. Maybe I'll find myself a tree to climb, just for fun. I'm old as the hills now, so I can climb if I want to.

Up we go, and making the grab.