Yes, I made it to 100

All ball games were cancelled because of the massive rainfall. So I was able to reach my 100th milestone this evening after the sky decided to stay clear. I had tried this cache, GCM2R1 streetcar trail, before, but I had the outdated coordinates. The newer ones worked much better. I'm never sure about where to park for this bike trail.

The gps-r had low batteries for many days before I reached this cache. Tonight, as I went to get my 101st find, they ran out. I found the cache, replaced the batteries, but couldn't get the power on. I was impatient to get out and find more geocaches. I panicked! What would I do? There was still daylight and no mosquitoes. I made a couple calls, got advice, but it didn't help. Was there a reset button that I didn't know about? I couldn't get the thing on when I plugged it into the car's power supply either. Argh!

I went home and looked in the manual. Troubleshooting. The unit won't turn on. New batteries? Yes. Properly aligned batteries? Yes. Did I hold the power button for a full two seconds? Maybe. I don't remember how long I held the button. I am pretty impatient. So I re-cleaned the contacts, re-checked the alignment of the batteries, then pressed and held the power button and counted to two. Ta-da! The display came up. I felt relieved that the gps-r was working, but frustrated that it would have worked while the sun was still up, enabling me to get to more hides. I drove home in the daylight! That just seems wrong when the weather is beautiful.

The Race to 100 Finds

Finally the sky is clear! I found an easy geocache last night before a meeting. That was my quick fix. PhotoV5 recently said that she was at 99 finds. After I hung up the phone with her, I realized that I am not too far from 100 -- after finding two caches today, I have 88 finds.

For me, part of geocaching is about just being in God's natural world. So today, we spent about five hours in Thomas Mitchell Park just being. We tried to introduce a friend to geocaching at the park, but we found stage one of a multi-stage cache instead of a regular cache, so no immediate treasure. Rather anti-climactic.

My favorite spring time flowers are beginning to emerge. Spring flowers always remind me of my grandmother. She and I hiked in our woods and looked at flowers when I was young. I remember her talking about searching for mushrooms, but I don't recall ever looking for mushrooms with her or seeing any on our property. Here is a photo of what my grandmother called "sweet williams." In books, I see it listed as phlox.

We also saw a man with a lingerie bag half-full of morel mushrooms. We looked once last year for the fun of it, and were unsuccessful in finding any. The man let us hold and feel a couple of them. He said that he had looked for about two hours, and that he and his wife use morels in the same way that I would use button mushrooms.

We also saw frogs, tadpoles, birds, squirrels, and more flowers, some in bloom, some not. I was finally able to make my first report on Project Budburst for two Jack-in-the-pulpits (To use the project's terms, "first flower" -- ha! More like "only flower." I don't know that I have ever seen a patch) that my older daughter found, and for numerous patches of mayapple ("full leaf"). I've been waiting all month to use my gps-r for this.

I also made a track log a la _Fun with GPS_. I hope to work more on the track log next week. I just found out that student portfolios are due next weekend, so that means I need to arrange materials nicely this weekend in order to have the mail delivered to our portfolio assessor next weekend. As usual, business first.