Sunday, May 15

Sunday, May 15, 2011
Everybody got to sleep in, even me – so we got a late start to the morning. That was ok, we all needed it. Steve is still not feeling well but a day of rest has helped, I think. We all ate breakfast, then Steve dozed back off and Scott showed me a bunch of pictures and video from his deployments and other stuff. Pretty cool. Also tried to watch a movie but it shut the sound off as it wasn’t a good copy, I guess. After a while, I thought that since Steve wanted to sleep and Scott would usually just watch movies on a Sunday afternoon (so he said), I asked to go out caching. Scott was willing so after lunch, off we went. Steve stayed back and got some more good rest.
First stop was a cache in Spang called Am Kalkoffen. It was a nano hidden at the town well. Didn’t find it. Scott was even looking, but no luck. Doesn’t help that the cache description, like most of them, was in German. I had tried to get some of them translated then changed in GSAK, but when I did the next update they changed back to German, so gave up on that project. I would have probably tried longer without Scott there, but didn’t want him to get too bored looking. So on to another cache. Metzenkapelle took us up on a little road above the town and to a cute little chapel alongside the road. After a short search I found the film canister cache. There seems to be a lot of these little chapels around, all paying homage to the Virgin Mary from what I could tell.
Then we tried another called Der Troll. We were still over a hundred feet away and the GPSr was leading us into a forested area that was pretty steep. I decided to pass on the find as Scott was in shorts and flip flops. Then, let’s see – we went to a TB hotel called The European Gateway to the World. I was able to pick up two travelers there and left two others from Michigan. Finally a full sized easy cache today! Moving on, we tried another cache that took us about 100 feet from the road into a (tall) grassy area next to a creek. The cache was supposedly behind a stump but we couldn’t find a stump. So another DNF. Then we tried for one that took us down a long road to someone’s house. Turned around at that point. Finally got lucky as we went to Speicher and found a cache (Speicherer Kapellchen) that was close to another chapel and on a walking trail. Wish we could have spent more time on the trail but not today. Left a traveler there as it was a regular sized cache. It had German geocaching labels which was cool. Took a back road to one last cache, Wasne Aussicht was its name and it had a very nice view of the valley below. A quick find which also gave me another traveler to take back to Michigan. Tried for a few more on the way back to Spang but no place to safely park that was close enough. On my own I might have gone for them, but not when a muggle is driving you around. Went to the base before we went back to Scott’s as Steve had requested a shake. Went to Burger King for the shake and got to at least check my email on the Ipod.
Came back to Scott’s and he let me use his 3G cell phone to go to geocaching.com and log my caches and traveler moves. That was nice but took a while with the small keyboard, etc. He grilled brats and burgers for us for dinner and we are now watching another movie. He has to get up very early tomorrow for ALS (Airman Leadership School) and we will be on our way to the Black Forest in the morning, so I don’t imagine it’ll be a very late night for us.