Today’s big adventure? Geowoodstock!
The big annual geocaching party was held just a few miles from where Irwin and I live, so my parents took the opportunity to come visit us and check it out. I had big plans to go for a run this morning, but when my alarm went off at 6:30 this morning, I immediately knew that wasn’t going to happen. I reset the alarm for 8 and didn’t move until it went off again. After spending all day on my feet, I’m not all that sad about pushing the run to tomorrow.
Once we were up and moving, we headed over to the Family Pancake House where I enjoyed a berry & nut waffle:
I was a litte bit disappointed that it wasn’t a big fluffy Belgian-style waffle, but the awesome variety of toppings made up for it. The waffle was topped with blueberries, strawberries, pecans, bananas and whipped cream. On the side? Two slices of bacon. As far as I’m concerned, you can never go wrong with bacon.
Once we were properly fortified, we headed over to the main event. There was an excellent turnout of geocachers, many of whom were wearing trackable items of some kind. There were a ton of people noting down ID numbers so they could log them as “discovered” in the Geocaching web site later on.
My personal favorite was this guy wearing a giant geocoin on a Mr. T-style chain:
When lunch time rolled around, we heard that the food lines were insanely long, so we decided to wait a bit longer before attempting to get food. Luckily, I’d packed my own snacks, so I had a pluot to munch on to tide me over.
I am a huge fan of these guys. They’re a combination of plums and apricots, and while the skin is a bit tart, the inside is sweet and juicy. My only complaint is that they’re only available during the summer, so, like cherries, I try to eat as many of them as I can while they’re out.
Once we decided to brave the lunch line, we found that it moved pretty quickly and that they had an excellent spread set up for us. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet of picnic and grill foods. I loaded my plate up with corn and watermelon:
And from the grill I selected a Garden Burger with cheese, topped with lettuce, onion and guacamole:
(I’d loaded my bun up with mustard and ketchup before I saw the guac, and was momentarily bummed out until I realized I could just scrape the inferior condiments off before eating my burger. So that’s exactly what I did. Guac > mustard and ketchup any day of the week.)
I was going to skip dessert, but they had strawberry shortcake, and it’s hard to turn down strawberry shortcake during the summer. I poked around and found a serving without whipped cream that had a high berry-to-cake ratio:
So good. It’s like summer in a bowl, even if it was only 60 degrees outside. (A temperature that I was totally OK with, since I could be outside all day without getting hot and sweaty and sunburned.)
After lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon checking out the geocoins and pathtags that people had available for sale or trade. While I’m not really into that aspect of the whole thing, it was fun to watch Irwin and my parents scoping out the scene for things to add to their collections.
I snacked on a beef stick on the way home, and as soon as we were back in the house I hit “nap and relax” mode. I’m running a midnight 5K tonight, and a nap was totally necessary if I was going to be awake for the race. With my nap out of the way, I helped myself to dinner: the leftovers of last night’s stir fry and rice.
I’ve got a couple of hours to kill before the race starts, which I plan to spend knitting and watching this morning’s coverage of the Tour prologue. I’m not a die-hard cycling fan, but I try to at least follow the Tour every year. The nice thing is that with this summer’s unemployment, I’ll actually have time to watch the coverage! Here’s hoping it’ll be an exciting 3 weeks of bike racing.
Running At Dawn 