Courageous Joy

I’VE BEEN SNAKE BIT!!!!

Or at least I thought I was. It turns out I was only cacti bit on the last cache of our day. It hurt…and I couldn’t see a thing…but when we got my shoe off….we found it. We really were doing “urban caches” today…..but this last one was up on a bluff overlooking the Concho river. It was an old home site and the cactus had taken over. All but Josiah gave up – he found it! At one point he slipped and fell – I had visions of having to go to the ER. “Josiah’s accident was private….very private” as the local bill board says. :::snort:::

To back up – this was a productive day for us. Josiah showed me the trick to finding caches for us that were in the SAME area. No more driving to hills behind the lake and then to Wall in the same day! :::snort::: While Josiah and Jamin worked: I watched the little ones, gave them a pep talk, found books for the first two weeks of school that the library had, ordered a couple of books from Amazon and found caches that centered in three areas of town. The areas are around our home, in a North park that we have never been to, and down by the river, where Kid’s Kingdom is. Adrienne called and wondered if we could meet at Kids Kingdom today. I told her we were going to cache but we’d drop by for an “hour or so”. We began. We found 3 cache’s….then got a call that Adrienne was going to be later than expected. Found another cache and went to the park. Kelly and children were at the park. The younger ones and I stayed.

Josiah and Jamin took the library list and went to pick up books. Josiah loves to do this chore for me – I love to have a driver in town…I miss leisurely browsing a library. I may have to take a few hours once a month and get out by myself to do this sort of thing. One book I was glad the library had was “The Great Feast of Redwall”. This is a picture book by the author of the Redwall series. My older boys have read this. My younger ones have not. We have been invited to a Redwall feast so I wanted to get the younger ones a bit more familiar with the happening of Redwall.

Adrienne and children arrived at the park and we visited while they played. The older boys came back and went to find a cache that was right down by where we were.

It was fun that Mandy and Martin showed up. She told me I had the “most distinctive…” I expected to hear vehicle as folks always know where I’ve been because they note the van. She said “family”. It seems she was driving over the bridge, looked down and saw the boys. LOL It was fun to visit with her for a few minutes. Remember, that her family just moved here earlier this month. Her dh is our newest chaplain. We talked about getting together for breakfast. The TLF (Temporary Lodging Facilities) are finally starting to close in on her. She’s a trooper – they close in on me much quicker.


After the park, we went to find one more cache that we had looked for earlier in the day. We were within 500 feet – but it was across a river. We found it – it was the one above.
Mike reminded me this a.m. that our goal was 120 caches by Jan 1st. Hmmm…..he is sure we can’t make it. We are accepting the challenge. We found six more today. I am in communication with a man who makes geonickels. I want him to put our AK logo on a wooden coin for us to leave spots. OH – Arielle got a beautiful bracelet today. I’m thinking we need to get supplies and make a bunch to leave in caches. She was thrilled to see something besides plastic spiders, frogs and super balls. We had left a couple in our first caches and they went FAST.

As I looked for the way home I said, “Does anyone know which direction to go?” and Zander yelled, “FOR – WARD, MOM!” Jamin commented that that is the only direction Zander knows…..and I must add it is always full speed ahead….but this day we wore him out!

On to the evening.