Head Coffin

GeoCaching… can there possibly be a more fun use of one’s GPS? Well short of being able to find your hotel when out of state, discovering a great Tia restaurant, or just making the right turn when trying to find GameBoard Revelotions. GeoCaching, if you don’t already know, is when one puts in GPS coordinates into one’s GPS and then hunts down small little containers. Why bother? For the thrill of finding such a thing (as GPS’s only really get you about 5-10 feet within the range) Signing a log, checking off another find, reaching that illustrious goal of 5000 caches found.

So we went down to Loa for the 4th of July and got a couple of GeoCaches in as well, and let me state that finding a cache in the wilderness is about 300 times easier then those urban caches, especially urban caches involving sticky pokey evergreen/spruce’s ahh how I hate those. We left Friday morning at the crack of 10.

We brought Baugh down with us, as well as Emo (the Rowley’s Beagle, which is apparently house broken only up to a certain elevation level, at which point alltraining goes out the window and she pee’s on rugs). On the way down we stopped in Scipio to get a few caches. We figured we’d let the dogs out for a bit of a stretch. Emo took off instantly into the tall weeds. All we could see of her was the tip of her tail swishing through the weeds. The Dog is funny, she’ll take off and pretend she can’t hear you until you get close enough, then she just lays down and act’s sad.

We didn’t really get much Cache’s on the way down, as they where a bit to distracting from the drive, and Vinny would only tolerate so much stop and go, however we where able to nab three of them.

However, once we did get down to Loa… oh the GeoCaching sweetness. Vinny, having such a little head, and the inability to sit up, or hold on to anything, or generally being 4-wheeler incompatible (and I was told we wont even consider him on a motorcycle tell at least 5, then we can “talk”) road around in the back of a jeep (in his car seat of course) while one of us navigated with our GPS While Lizzy’s Dad drove, and the other two of us road on either the 4-wheeler or the Dirt bike.

In Loa, there’s this place called “Big Rocks” that consists of lots of really big rocks… go figure. There are a lot of volcanic rocks lying all around and a great place for Dirt Biking, motor cycling, Jeep trecking, or just general hiking. Our first cache we found, we could only get within about 500 feet before the rocks where just to big, and the path just to narrow, so we hoofed it the rest of the way. It was in an Icecream bucket stuffed behind some rocks. We found a bunch of others as well, one that was in a Pepsi Refill mug (I found that one) One that was in a little tupperware under some rocks on the edge of a ledge cliff thing (Fred found that one). We also saw some pretty kewl stuff looking for them. There is this one area that has a Wash from when it rains, that has smoothed out all the rocks, so it’s a kind of waterslide if you will. It was neat seeing that thing, as it’s right on the path to finding the Geocache, which is one of the perks of GeoCaching, finding new and interesting things on the way.

Anyways, there is plenty to do down in Loa besides just Geocaching, such as riding the fourwheeler around, or the Dirtbike, or Riding the Fourwheeler and Dirtbike to get Geocaches. In our case we did that, and went to a BBQ, watched some fireworks (the good kind) went to a parade the next day and looked at various random stuff.

Down in Loa we went to a BBQ that some cousins of my inlaws where throwing. They had a lot of truly tasty food. My favorite being the homemade rootbeer that tasted like what you’d get if you mixed Barq’s with Coors. It was very very tasty. They lit off some fireworks there as well (Loa doesn’t have as restrictive of firework laws as other lame places in Utah) I got to wave flaming embers in front of Vinny’s face for the first time. I could tell he was enjoying the destructive power of fire, mixed with magnesium. I mean who doesn’t?

The next day we went down to see the infamous Tory Parade. This parade would go down their mainstreet (they have 4) and when they get to the end, turn around and come back. It was said so that they could switch shifts, those watching could be in the parade, and those in the parade could see it. Anyways we only caught the tail end of the event, but I did see a camel. Little known fact about camel’s, they make all parades much more enjoyable. I think it’s because they are just silly looking animals. I had taken two pictures of the critter, but the first one you can’t even tell what it’s of. (thatsthis picture over here on the left). Seeing the camel did make me think of the “Camels through the desert” boardgame I played with Rowley a few days earlier.

Why would anyone be fooled by such a ridiculously fake looking Sheriff

Well I’m here to tell you that when you are blazing into town going a bit faster then you should, and you see that cop car with someone sitting inside, Hat, Glasses and Mustache, you slow down real fast. We also walked around for a time looking at all the vendors and little tent shops they had. The nice thing about doing something with more then just me n’ Liz is that we can pass Vinny off onto other people to hold when we get tired. Sure the kid weighs like 15 pounds, but that gets heavy after a few hours.

One interesting thing about Loa and Wayne County is that there are a lot of old houses using interesting architecture methods from way back in forever ago. I saw one house that looked like it was made out of Lincoln logs with the green roof and everything. A Purple Brick house, whose bricks where actually stones that where carved into Bricks. We stared at this house for a while, as it was just so different looking. There was also this house/pagota thingy in Tory we saw on the way back to Loa. It was made out of stone, and looked very comfortable inside. My guess is it was some kind of Native American Time Share Condo back in the day, where the Indigenous people of this country would go to meetings and presentations for about 2 hours, then the head wigawong would try and convince them to trade their horses and wives for a slice of vacation time in these fabulous Native American Condo’s. The best part about this thing? It has a tunnel that leads into the house. Can you imagine how handy a Tunnel is? It’s useful for both zombie invasions, and if your town is infested with vampires. Plus there’s things like smuggling moonshine that tunnels come in handy, battling bakers, and protecting ones self from aliens incapable of opening doors.

On an unrelated note, I discovered in my phone’s camera settings a Burst mode. I’m not sure if some of you have ever used this, but in most other camera’s you get quite a few pictures in a very short amount of time. I got 5 pictures and it took a bit longer then one would attribute to a Burst Like Mode. Of which only one picture was worth keeping, but it’s a darn good one. Will have to play with this setting some more to see what kind of things I can capture.

One nice thing bout taking the dogs down to Loa, is they can play, wrestle, and generally have a good time without making us to crazy. It also helps that the neighbors got a new puppy as well. Some kind of Shitzu,Terrier, Chihuahua puppy thing that had endless amounts of energy. Which since it was our pups that where playing with her, was fine by me. As you can see from my excellently blury pictures, the dogs would never hold still long enough for me to get a picture of em. So instead you must all suffer through these semi functional pictures of the dogs spazzing out. Along with the puppy that would come over, would be all the little kids to play on the swings. It would be 8 in the morning and they’d come trooping out in their PJ’s to get some swing time in. Reminded me alot of our Tire swing back at our old house, where the neighbor hood kids would just go crazy over that thing.

Oh and I forgot to mention, Vinny did get to chill for a bit in a lawn chair. He was very intrigued by the whole, not falling over when sitting concept. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell that he could get used to this kind of relaxing. Just sitting, with out your head pulling the rest of you over, sitting up so you can see in front of you instead of just directly above you, and not having to worry that if your hands move a little to fast you’re head will go plummeting towards the ground.

Our last day out Me n Liz went to get two more GeoCaches. Both had listed a Jeep as needed for access. We took the 4-wheeler and Dirt Bike out instead of the jeep. (had a dead radiator) The first cache wasn’t that bad, park at the bottom of the mountain, hike up a bit, look around and find the thing (well camouflaged, can you see it?).

Looking at our GPS we figured the next was just up the side of the mountain and commenced to drive up the side of the mountain. Things got a bit scary going up for me on the Bike, as we went up this gully filled with very large rocks, and quite a few of them. After that harry experience we looked back on the GPS and it seemed we where heading in the wrong direction so had to backtrack. Not wanting to go back the same way we went, I suggested we drive down this smooth and easy looking path. Yeah that ended in another Gully. Lucky for me there was a very narrow path on the side that was all smooth. Liz however had to take the 4-wheeler straight down the thing and it was a heck of an experience.

So we get down look at the GPS and commence to drive all over the mountain. After doing this for what seemed like a good 30 minutes, check the GPS again and realize two important things:

1. We where looking at it zoomed out, and so the Cache was a lot farther away from the first then we thought
2. Those brown lines on the GPS represent roads… Oh look that road leads all the way there.

yeah… while very fun experience, trecking over wilderness wasn’t actually needed for the cache. Needless to say we nabbed the thing in the end.

Before we left Loa, said goodbye to Chaz, as is customary of any visit to Loa.

There are other pictures from the trip, but I honestly couldn’t figure out how to fit them in, and I’m tired of typing words. There is a Gallarey of all the pictures thats listed on the menu. If one truly wishes to see all that went down from this trip, get with the clicky. The descriptions of the pictures are worth the download.

As allways, all pictures taken with Nokia N95-3 phone. Suck them apples.