Spent the morning with my sponsor. Dawn Patrol meeting, and then doing step work that went well, but was of course emotionally intense and somewhat exhausting.
Around mid-day
grouchychris and I went up to Bellingham to go geocaching with Mikek and AlmightyJessica. The drive up was gorgeous and frustrating, because the traffic was insane until well beyond Everett. But we took Chuckanut Drive for the last leg of the trip, which was beautiful and a fine road to put the Miata through its paces. I can begin to see Ian Fleming's points about manual transmission, under such situations.So we got to Bellingham a bit later than we'd estimated, but still with plenty of time to go on our hunt. We printed out a couple of caches to look for over in the Alabama Hill/Whatcom Falls greenbelt. Back in the day I used to run around in that area when I lived down on Texas St. in the Gutter (that's the name of the house, son), but the day happens to be exactly twenty years ago, so there have been a few changes. *cough*
However, I still know my way around, it seems, since I was able to get us back to the car by a shorter route once we'd found our caches. The second one was a multi-stage cache that took us through a tour of Whatcom Falls park in a big loop, which by the end of I was tired enough not to want to retrace. So I dragged the somewhat unconvinced group back car-wards via a route that at one point inspired despair in some by cutting out of the park into the residential area, then back in to the park again. Hey, it's not my fault that what used to be a huge undeveloped swath of land is now giant houses and manicured cul-des-sacs. Besides, I was going by knowing where the car was in relation to where we were more than absolute knowledge of the terrain... It worked, that's the important part.
We found both caches, and once we had caught our breath and returned to the house to devour some gardenburgers, we decided we were quite content with the day. Echo,
bookish_girl_ and James came over, and we played several games of Chrononauts. We left for home in the magical crepuscular light of the fading sunset, with the crescent moon and the leaves of the trees all picked out in silver. 