Caching and Chocolate

Sunday, August 9, 2015 odometer reading 1,003 miles. Louisville, KY

            Today I made up for stopping early last night. I stopped in Breezewood, where I-70 E and I-76 E part company. In fact, I’d wanted to stop an hour further west when I-70 WEST separates from the PA Turnpike. Well, as tired as I was it was not such a bad thing, but I drove fast and with few stops today, racking up 580 road miles. West Virginia is totally nuts. The Interstate through there has such steep slopes my transmission was auto-shifting at highway speeds, which in that state are posted at 70 (which the roads are often not designed or maintained for) and cars are actually going 75 to 80. There I stopped twice for gas (poor Bruce) and once for a quick lunch. Once again a so-called fast-food joint had me waiting longer than I would have in a sit-down luncheonette.

            I took the first exit off I-64 when I entered Kentucky, knowing I’d loaded a JOE (Just Off Exit) cache in the Garmin at home. I pulled into a convenience store lot to turn on the Garmin and start hunting, but my bladder and the heat drove me inside where I purchased and somehow ate an overly-chewy ice cream confection called a Choco Taco. My hands were sticky on the wheel and leaving smudges of chocolate on the GPS as I returned to the side road, crossed the Interstate, and turned up the next little country road. Less than a quarter of a mile later, I was carefully insinuating my hand past an inconvenient growth of briar rose covering the end curl of a guard rail. “WAHOOO!” I exclaimed as I held up the jungle-camo covered container (For a guard rail cache?). “My first cache find in Kentucky! A new state souvenir! My first new one since December ’13.” I didn’t even notice the oppressive humidity and heat until had signed the log and was trudging the short distance back to the car.

            Sixteen miles later, the Garmin led me into a rest stop. Yes, I was trying to rack up miles and make up for lost time, but caching in new places is the primary goal of the trip. Besides, I love caches placed near rest stops. They encourage me to pause and exercise my arthritic old body, breaking up a day spent behind the wheel so I don’t wind up painfully stiff. Most are bordering wooded areas, if not actually in them, which provides a dose of natural surroundings after the glaring artificial environment of the Interstates. So it eases stress as well as being physically healthy. This one required me to clamber up a rather steep, longish slope to the trees, wearing sandals and without my walking stick. Eventually I spotted an Altoids-sized tin with a few springs of grass carelessly scraped over it, hiding nothing. I am just loving the camo on the caches I’ve found this trip. It’s ranged from glaringly obvious to none at all like this one. This has made them easy to spot, but the locations have been chosen for seclusion and a low chance that anyone not actually hunting the cache would be anywhere close.

            After that, I headed west, hoping to get past Lexington’s traffic and exceed my goal of 550 miles for the day. One more gas stop, and I found myself in Louisville, in a good position to cross into Indiana forty minutes or less after checking out tomorrow morning, ready to add yet another state to my collection of States I’ve Found Geocaches In. This part of town makes Breezewood with its ‘hundred motels’ look like a rural cluster of tourist traps; it is HUGE and includes dozens of hotels, hundreds of eateries, some shops, and even some light industry buildings. It took me almost a half-hour after leaving the Interstate to find the right series of service roads to get to the Sleep Inn. Because of this chaos at the end of a long day, dinner was a package of vending machine Donette Gems washed down with lukewarm Diet Coke.

Tomorrow afternoon sometime I should be handling the most massive hassle of the trip, downtown St. Louis, MO. The famous Arch is closed for renovations, but thanks to geocaching I’ll be led to one of the best spots to view it (and get a virtual cache find). The hard part will be getting out of town and finding I-70. Oh, how I hate city driving, especially in a strange city!