102 - 18 hours

What a busy hectic week I've had! Back to work last Monday (with a new 2 month old baby girl!) then straight from work to Vacation Bible School. That was the schedule pretty much all week, the days I didn't work I had errands and other activities to fill the day, then VBS in the evenings. I led the 2nd/3rd grade group and also presented the lesson on Wednesday and Friday.

So this is the first chance to blog since my big day last Saturday (a week ago.) Since we returned from vacation in time, I was able to keep my plans with three other geocaching friends to attempt a 100-cache day.

We all met at my house (farthest east) at 5:30 a.m., loaded everything into Joe's car and headed east. First cache about 6:15 a.m., we had to drive a ways to find caches that none of us had found. We all had assigned tasks to make the day more efficient: Joe of course was the designated driver (and we even found him an official pin in a cache); Joel was the navigator; Linda was the "secretary," keeping track of finds, and I was the "labeler" applying the special label that Joe had made with our names and the date, to the cache log. Definite time-saver! We of course all had the job of looking for the cache, I would say we each found our share of them.

The day kind of blurs together now but we found a lot of caches throughout the morning, mostly quick ones out of necessity. We were eventually headed for Sleepy Hollow State Park where there were quite a few caches. What hadn't been taken into account was that there would be more hiking between caches here. In a couple of hours, I think we only got 5 caches. So decided to move on to the M-52 Pick-up series, a set of 52 caches along M-52. We also thought these would be easier but many of them turned out to be small tubes hidden in pine trees. We ended up with about half of them before we realized that we wouldn't finish the series and needed to find some easy quick ones.

By now it was getting dark, so we became limited in our choices. No cemetery caching after dark, and no park caching. So mostly near (closed and open) businesses or park & rides. We finally stopped in Portland, Michigan for our last few caches and found #100 at 11:50 p.m. We found one more just before midnight for a total of 101 for the day. 20 minutes later, we stopped on the way home and found #102 for the trip, a challenge cache for those who've found 100 caches in a day. We were second to find since it was a pretty new cache. Home just before 1 a.m., about 18 hours of caching.

I don't think I'll ever attempt something like that again. The caches started to blur together, and I found it hard to write logs on some of them as I just didn't remember much about them. And logging - because of my busy week, it was Thursday before I finished logging. Of course, part of that was because I'd brought a traveler that was in a race home from Ontario and I logged it into every one of those caches before leaving it at the challenge cache at the end of the day. The owner was quite appreciative, even thanking me in his traveler's listing and he is going to send me a pathtag from the caching organization up there.

But all in all it was a great day spent with good caching friends.