Valkyrie

Yesterday, Adam, Kyle and I took a trip up to Dallas, Wisconsin, and Chetek.  Valkyrie Brewing, where we visited many years ago, was adding a tap room and we wanted to see it.  So we packed up everything for an overnight camping trip we didn't actually stay for, and drove two hours to check it out.  The owner was at a local beer festival, but his wife put up with us for about four hours, perhaps more, showing us the brewery, telling us about all the work she'd done on the concrete bar and the stenciling and the faux-stone walls, and talking about local beer laws and what it had been like after they'd sold their Viking Beer name to an Icelandic company and waiting for the Valkyrie name to clear for eight months.  Very educational.

While we were there, a little girl came in and bought the only four pack of root beer in the fridge.  But it had been mentioned earlier in our conversations that there was a new batch being bottled downstairs.  So the owner was nice enough to send her daughter down to bring back four unlabeled bottles and then she (the pregnant daughter in charge of bottling) signed a cap for Eryn.



After Valkyrie, we headed over to Chetek to have a yuck burger at B&B's.  We remembered to ask for onions this time, but I agree with Kyle, the amount of peanut butter seemed diminished once the onions were in place.  Delicious, nonetheless.  Although we ate entirely too much during the day.  Big breakfast.  Big lunch.  Dinner with pie.  Oof.

We also went over to Gilligan's where we had joked Adam would be cornholed.  We played a beanbag game only to learn that that WAS cornholing.  The loser of the game had to stand on the sunny side which resulted in an overage of sun after the trip up in the convertible.  Ron had recommended Gilligan's, and it was ok, but the crowd, at least while we were there, seemed a bit old.  The cover band, the Thundermen, averaged about 65.  Kyle felt bad for the bridal party that was just wandering around surrounded by old folks because they had committed to hitting every bar around the lake.

The owner at Valkyrie told us Oktoberfest is a very family-friendly event in Dallas.  There's a Kubb tournament.  A giant bratwurst.  And the day wraps up by 5:00 p.m. so things don't get too wild.  We're pondering a trip up there around that time with the families.

Kinnickinnic Caching III

This is Boss' leg after geocaching in Kinnickinnic State Park in Wisconsin.  It was unmarred before he started.  And if you think this is bad, you should see what one of those nasty brambles did to his face.  Geocaching is not for the faint of heart.  It's a violent, brutal, sport.

 

I can't believe how unscary this picture looks.  I was very paranoid about stepping out on this tree.  It's about 3x longer than it looks.  It's about 5x higher off the ground.  And it's about 20x less stable.  I'm not making that up.  I'm not generally nervous about stepping out on edges and structurally unsound things, but I was nervous about this tree.


Left.  Box.  Right.  Box.  Boxes everywhere.  You want some box?  Go anywhere but straight ahead and you'll get yourself some box.  Me?  I like box.  This sign made me very happy.  There's a map in case you get lost on the way to the box.


SMAH!!!!  Or SAHM!!!!  Something like that.  This is a letterbox.  The idiot's geocache.  Who has time to carry a stamp with them?  Oh...that's right.  BOBCAM does.  We saw his stamped signature all over the place.  I have no doubts that if you want to pull down caching numbers in the tens of thousands, you have to find ways to streamline.  This is one of the nicer letterboxes I've seen as it really did double duty as a cache. Only three stamps in the log book, however.  Sort of sad given the love and attention lavished on the box.


I WILL HUMP THE S*** OUT OF YOU GEOCACHE!!!  We've all seen those humping tortoise videos.  Don't pretend you haven't.  This is one very confused tortoise.  It's probably the camo.


Oven top.  We took the roundabout route to this one.  Sort of walked in a spiral that narrowed in on it only to realize it was only about 100' off the main path on a tributary path.  Strange object to find in the woods.


Boss, being all serious about his geocaching.  Or offering me something from his bag of crack.  Hard to say. But the context implies geocaching.


Tigger!  Fortunately, there was no Pooh in the cache.


This was a fun one.  The cache is in the handle of the shovel - it had a name like "I dig this park".


Moe the Sleaze was here!  I showed this picture to Eryn and then had to explain what a sleaze was.  Chaymus (from work) asked me how I explained "sleaze".  I tried to tell her it was sort of the boy who paid you too much attention, but if you were older than 8.  And who told jokes you shouldn't be listening to.  I admit, it was a rather loose definition that wasn't "some guy who caches".


There's a cache in that tree.  Part of our day took us completely around this prairie grass area.  Quite the hike.


That is a plunger.  Did you know that a plunger fits perfectly over a peanut butter jar?  It's like how your hand, at the middle finger, is exactly the size of your mini me.  Or your reach is your height.  Or your foot length corresponds to your IQ.  Or the cc's in your mouth are exactly the cc's of your balls.  It's true...  Don't believe me?  Try it.


F-in bird caches.  They always scare me.  You're looking and looking and then there's a bird next to your head and you're worried you've caught some bird-borne virus.


Guess!!!  It's a cache .........  cache ......  cow!  Looks like an ornament.  Boss and I discussed that we should put out a temporary cache at Christmas that has about a thousand ornaments, each with "look at the blank ornament"  inside a container.  If you're really lucky, you manage to start a few reads from the end.  If you're unlucky, you start about 200 reads from the end.  Brutal.  A multi-cache on a single tree.


I don't know why.  It's a screw for a boat.  It's in the woods.  There's no water.  There are no boats.  But there weren't any cows or toilets either.  Wait...scratch that.  There were toilets.


See.  I s*** a cache.  Don't I look blissfully happy turtling something larger than my head into a bed pan?  Since the surgery, I have the balloon knot of a superhero. I could pass a dozen caches and still be relaxed and ready to hike the next tenth of a mile.

Excellent day of caching.  It's good to set a personal record.

Kinnickinnic Caching II

As I mentioned earlier, Friday was a big geocaching day.  Boss and I found 36 caches.  At least I found 36.  He found 37 with the one I pointed him to in Prescott.  We did our caching at Kinnickinnic State Park in Wisconsin, which may be the very first time I've ever paid to cache.  And out of state visitor fees at that.  It cost us approximately $0.33/cache, or half that if you count each cache twice because there were two of us.   We noticed Bobcam hadn't been there until recently, which seemed strange, but it was my hypothesis that he's a nonresident as well.  If you do like 30,000 caches at .33 each, that's $10,000!  That's a semi-expensive hobby.

 

Despite it being mid-March, the park was beautiful.  Very nice for hiking.  I only found one wood tick.  Yep.  Wood tick. You heard me right.  Little Scony bloodsucker.  Isn't it disturbing that such an idyllic setting has a dark side?


Our first cache was a multicache with a phone.  This was next.  Bear with a butt plug.  I kept the highlander keychain.  That's the coolest swag I've found in quite a while.  I left behind oodles of beads.  Not the usual plastic zombies I leave behind, but I have this giant box of caching stuff to unload for which I've swapped zombies in the past, so it's time to put it all back out in the woods.  If you see topless women running around Kinnickinnic, you can thank me.


We did two mystery caches.  Usually those are evil and difficult and may even require access to the internet if you have to figure out the years of the movies of all the Bond girls.  But I researched these before we went, and they involved reading a plaque.  Boss was quick to point out that Clyde L. Butch Wolf was only 54 when he died, which meant we had a mere decade left.  I think he was killed by a tick.


The other mystery cache plaque.  It seemed brand new, and yet someone had already tried to carve a heart in it.


F the law!  I do what I want!  You don't own me!  And we got away with it too.


Yum!


Near the park plaque.  The view for which the park is famous.  In Wisconsin circles at least.  Almost looks like something you'd see in Oregon.


Monkey paw!  Make a wish!  I wish I find the next cache and that it's not down a steep, muddy, hill, into a scary ravine, and then up an enormous, muddy hill infested with nasty brambles, only to find a trail right next to it when I get there.  Stupid monkey paw.  Didn't work for s***.


Near the overlook.  We got off trail after this one as well.  General rule of thumb, if you're climbing extremely large hills, you're probably doing something wrong.


Except this hill.  This is the "easy" hill after taking the difficult way to find the cache at the bottom. I'm not sure if you can appreciate it from the photo, but we had to take two microbreaks on the way up.  I blame the elevation and thin air.


Down at the bottom is the St. Croix river.  It has an inlet for swimming which doesn't get much water flow, so it was still frozen.  Enough for these geese, but not for us.  Looks a bit like a glacier.  I'm not sure what the geese were up to - mostly just staying away from us.


To be continued...me on a toilet, any way to the box, and Moe the Sleeze.

Geocaching Woodville, Part II

A continuation of the earlier post.  Yet one more location where I didn't realize I was looking for a mystery cache.  I ended up crawling around in a drain under a highway and wondering how it would be accessible if water was running under the road.


Who is the inspector dude?  I recognize him from cartoons, but they weren't cartoons I watched.


It's Alice!!! Run for the bridge across the chasm!  Fusaki! Fusaki!!! It's ironic that I managed to get past a raptor and score the cache it was guarding, only to be chewed on later by a bloodhound.  Luck was with me, it wasn't a pack like in Jurassic Park.  Individual raptors are stupid.  Stooopid.  Play some tap music, and they start tapping their hallux and can't stop.


This took me back to the days when I had hemorrhoids and Eryn and I were doing the Halloween series here in the southern metro that Bart had placed.  That was a watershed.  Pizza challenge, Halloween caches, hemorrhoid surgery.  Put enough big events in a two day period and you never forget it.


Somewhere, nearby, natives are guarding giant gates holding back an even gianter great ape.  Or perhaps Marie Laveau was caching before me, despite the lack of a signature attesting to her presence.  More importantly, don't put a finger in your mouth after touching a rusty, corroded, moldy, cache necklace.  That's the real lesson you should come away with.


A sneaky cache hidden in some rusted out old farm machinery.


Let the photoshopping begin.  What can you put on the missing half of my head that would be most amusing?  Some caching bling.


The raptor trespassed.  Stooopid raptor.  Now he's married to some farmer's daughter.  So...a raptor went to a farm house and asked the farmer, "Can we spend the night at your farm?"  The farmer said, "Sure you can.  Just make sure you stay away from my three beautiful daughters."  The raptor assured him he could.  But in the middle of the night, the first daughter came to visit him where he was staying in the barn and the raptor found he was no match for her curvaceous charms.  Wild trans-human sex ensued and the raptor fell back to sleep.  A few hours later, the second daughter showed up and although the raptor thought there was no way he could get aroused so soon, she was even more persuasive than the first daughter and they did it dino style.  He went back to sleep.  But a few hours later the third daughter showed up and she was a vision.  The raptor perked up and showed her the meaning of terrible lizard.  Hours later he was awoken by the farmer who was pointing a shotgun at him.  "You defiled my daughters, and now you have to pay.  You'll be marryin' one of them."  The raptor, a comittaphobe, was initially concerned, but after a moment to think it through, decided marrying the youngest daughter was preferable to a hide full of buckshot.  A wonderful ceremony ensued, and the minister asked, "Do you take this raptor to be your lawfully wedded dinosaur?"  And the farmer's daughter assured everyone she did.  The minister stated, "And do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded human?"  The raptor assured everyone he did.  The minister stated, "I now pronounce you dinosaur and wife."  After that they lived happily ever after, raising a brood of Sleestak and creating one of the most profitable farming combines in history, eventually selling out to Monsanto and creating a habitat where all human/dino halfbreeds could live in peace.  Damn it...I was going to use the punchline "I don't know about his ability as a farmer, but when we were doing it, I was in raptor."  That probably would have been better.


The cache description implied these were lunch pails.  They looked more like a good place to take a leak.  Not that I did!  They just looked appropriate.


SIR! We have secured Gearburger Hill, Sir! We now have a commanding view of the entire bike.  You may rest assured that no [insert culturally inappropriate word for enemies here] will ever be able to rest this bike from our control.  I have deployed snipers to the pedals and we have flamethrowers cleaning up the headtubes where the enemy has gone to ground.  Disregard any rumors you may have heard about soldiers setting fire to innocents in the spokes.


I stood in front of this cache for a while wondering whether it was a trap.  I followed the rope up to the end of the line just to be sure I wasn't going to pull a pot full of pig's blood down on my head.


End of the line! I talked about the hill leading up to this stop sign in the last post.  When the county cop was talking to me I was wondering whether he'd be concerned that I'd reached the county line and think my dog bite belonged to the next county over.  But it all worked out.  Except for this tetanus shot.  That thing blows.  Feels like I've got the flu and my arm is a mess.  I just tried to haul a dozen bags of sticks and grass and leaves to the corner, and I have to load the dog cage in the car tomorrow and I'm not looking forward to it.  I once had a nurse who told me tetanus shots don't make your arm hurt.  To which I say, "Bull*LKDJFL!@$^#$%^."  But, it was a good day except for the bite.  Good caching.  Good bicycling.

Geocaching Woodville - Part I

Yesterday I did the first end of the trail in Woodville, Wisconsin, and logged 27 caches. I don't think that's my best day. If I go look at the geocaching statistics on geocaching.com, it appears it's my third best. 34 with Klund and Ming trumps earlier this year. And I had a 28 cache day with The Boss. I'm disappointed I didn't find two more caches yesterday just to bother Boss. That might have made being bitten by a dog worth it. But it is my best solo day ever.

Here's a summary montage of some of the pictures, for those of you like Ming who are impatient with long posts.
 

Here's a picture of the path I followed, starting from the north end.  Where the green unfounds start isn't the end of my ride, it just happens to be where I quit to find the end of the trail by bike so I was sure I'd have time to get back to the car in time to get Eryn from school.  If I had just kept caching, perhaps I'd have avoided the dog.


Whose sign is this?  Nacho sign!  If I hadn't been bitten by the dog, I would have driven out to try out the brew pub.  I may go back to try it out, but I'll cache in Stillwater on the way and only hit the end of the trail where the "13 Days of Christmas" caches are that I didn't do.

The day started at this sign, which didn't seem to officially be part of the trail as there was lots of wet grass as it cut through the woods.  It was right after this sign that I lost my camera while taking a...break.  My first geocache of the day was to find my own, new camera, worried that it was now wet with nasty...forest...residue.  From here, the path seemed to follow the direction of the path on the other side of town, so perhaps it's part of an old rail bed.


My first cache of the day! I had to hop across a narrow ditch full of water.  But prior to hopping, I put one foot into the ditch and water flowed into my shoe through the toehole I've worn in it while bicycling.  So this cache stayed with me all day in the form of a slightly soggy foot.


If there was a hot redhead in a sundress lurking in this picture, I'd be a shoe in for The Chive's hot girls in the middle of nowhere series.  I did the lighting on purpose for this picture, and it turned out nicely, so I'm very proud of myself.  "Hot Cache in the Middle of Nowhere".


I didn't pay attention to GSAK settings and it's been a while, so I didn't realize I had a mix of traditional, multi-stage, and mystery/puzzle caches in my GPS.  Unfortunately, that meant I ended up at a mystery cache at the cemetery looking for a traditional cache.  Caches are almost never on private/church land, so it made me rather nervous.  I felt like I did when the guy in North Dakota came to grill Ming and I about why we were looking around the city sign for a cache.  After 20 minutes, I figured something was up and gave up.  But this tombstone was very close to where I was looking in a series of pine trees.  The cache was something about Norwegians, so this confused me.  Virgil and Leona, very Scandinavian sounding.  Wang?  Research shows that it's a very Scandinavian name, derived from Vang.


One of the first caches.  Thought they were clever with the magnet in the old paint can.  There weren't too many magnet-based caches during the day.  Most of them were just hidden in the brush well off the trail and not exactly at the coordinates, so you had to do quite a bit of digging around to find them.  That, or  my GPS was off by up to 40 feet all day.


This was a more surmountable obstacle than the big puddle I encountered earlier on the trail.  I'm always happy to see that trees fall when no one is around, that way they don't fall on me.


Couple of caches were in pines.  Smelled wonderful.


This is an example of what I was talking about when I said they were just laying around off the trail.  Go 20-50' into the brush and junk on the side of the trail, and some of them were just laying in the open.  Others were damn hard to find, particularly when there were four or five layers of desiccated shrubbery.


Woodville's troll.  Guarding the grain storage rather than a bridge.


Obviously "official".


I found a pair of glasses in a cache.  I didn't swap anything for them.  My trades were for coins and things Eryn might like.  But I do take my picture with cache "props" when I get the opportunity.  I should have stayed on the path to being a Tudor/Stuart history professor.  I look like someone's professor.  Or grandpa.  Notice it was warm enough to wear two layers of t-shirts?  Might be the last day of the year with a reasonable temperature.


Boring cache picture.  Unless you're really into cache p0rn.


Almost every cache was slightly different.  I think someone had a lot of old containers sitting around that didn't make it out the door at the garage sale.


This one was peculiar.  I'm not sure why it needed to be in the form of a baseball cap.  One of the cachers up here did a series using all the team caps, but this wasn't part of a series that I could discern.  I did finally catch on by about this point that the name of the cache, which doesn't show up in my GPS unless I back out a screen, is uber-important.  Names like "Wrapping Tree" and "Don't Trespass" really help you hone in on the right location when the cache is just in the general vicinity.


The fence posts were interesting.  I don't know what sort of wood they were made out of, but this is one of them from the top down.


Rolling under I-94.  This is the only paved part of the whole trail.  Overall, it's pretty bumpy and hilly and, in some parts, it's composed of rocks about a third the size of a golf ball.  Rough riding, even on my mountain bike with the wide (although non-knobby) tires.  At the very end was a hill so steep, so rocky, so covered with loose dirt and leaves, that I couldn't make it even half-way up on my bike.  A strange feature for a bike trail.