A Memorable Caching Memorial Day

Sitting in front of the computer, minding my own business on a glorious day away from work (aka - Paid Holiday!!!!!) and ZING... and new cache is published... and I look at it... and it tortures me... because it is VERY near my house, and I DON'T HAVE A CAR!!!!! The other half unfortunately had to work today... and I AM STRANDED! Who knew? Who knew that I would end up being tormented with the knowledge that I could be a first to find... finally. So - in my torment I text messaged GiraffeGirl... and she answered that she was on her way (translation - get your gear together, I'm coming to swoop you up). And so, I quickly showered and changed clothes, loaded my coordinates, and waited for my heroine, my dear friend, my caching comrade - GiraffeGirl and her Zoom Zoom (TB194B8) big ole travel bug. Away we went. We arrived at the nearest parking coordinates to ground zero for the new cache - Pesky Refrigerator Magnets (GC1CM88). It was still raining a smidge - but we didn't care. We headed into the wooded area, and GiraffeGirl made the find. She slowly opened the log....are we? could it be? did we move fast enough? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..... we were #2 to find - a mere 40 minutes behind the #1. Oh well, it just wasn't meant to be our day for a FTF. So, I left a fridge magnet, and my American Flag 11/2007 Geocoin-ljb, I took the Geolicious - Mountain Cache Geocoin (TB1JR87) coin and we headed back to the car.

I told GiraffeGirl about the adventures I had the day before, and how I had sooooooooo wanted to retrieve a particular TB from the Frisbee Hills (GCT327) cache, and what do you suppose she did? Yep, we drove right on over there, parked as close as the coordinates would allow (probably not really supposed to park there, but we didn't think there would be a great deal of traffic in the park this morning because of the rain) - and we trekked off down to the site of Stage 2. Once again GiraffeGirl made the find - and YES! Happy Cow (TBGET6) was still there, and I happily snagged her up. I left the very first Geocoin I had ever purchased - the Geoswag April 2007 (TB1KY4V) coin and some other swag I can't remember... and back to the Zoom Zoom we headed. Before departing the general vacinity, we snapped some pics of our TB's 'hanging' around then we darted off.

GiraffeGirl had not been able to grab the Fountain Tour - Children's Fountain (GC13CMM) yet, so we headed on down to pick it up. She made the find relatively easily, and we snapped some more pics of our traveling gang of bugs, and back on the road we went.

GiraffeGirl made a quick call home, and we headed to the Giraffe nest to take care of some family business. We ate some wonderful barbeque leftovers, loaded up Zoom Zoom again, and headed up to Zona Rosa. I had not found stage 2 of Fountain Tour - Zona Rosa (GC140NK) so she stopped there so I could wrap this one up. No room for trade items here - so I signed the log and we planned our attack for the rest of the day. I still had a group of caches in the downtown area that I had mapped out for our last trip, so we headed that way to snag some of those.

First stop on the way downtown was the SAC (GC1A9DX) cache at the Downtown Airport. What a cool place this was. We were a little bummed that the museum wasn't open, but we were tickled with the cache. I snagged a baseball that was in the cache - kind of cool - people have been writing the caches it has visited on the ball. I'll have to find an appropriately themed baseball cache to put this one in. I also left my January 2008 GCC Geocoin-LJB (TB23WGD) coin. We snapped some more pics of the TB gang before we headed back to the road. We headed into downtown, and went in search of the Old Northeast Potatoe Cache (GC1508) - a virtual that I had been wanting to get to for some time. It's a very interesting landmark, and as usual, very worthwhile to hunt down. The neighborhood could be a little scary if one were alone, but we felt fairly safe in broad daylight. As long as we were up here we went and snagged Kansas City Lights (GCQHBX) - another beautiful neighborhood cache and an unbelievable view. We could see all the way to World's of Fun from this vantage point. We snapped some pics of the Bugs enjoying the view, and traveled on.

Next we headed down to the Kansas City Power and Light Employee's Memorial (GCJJ8V) so GiraffeGirl could pick this one up. I snapped some more pics of the traveling Bugs, and away we went! Next 2 stops were down to the Riverfront park so GiraffeGirl could grab 2 caches I had gotten last weekend - Diving Riverfront Park (GCYBY3) and Kansas City Floods (GC10MJ7). Of course more pics of the Bugs hanging out... and off we went again. GiraffeGirl passed on the Steamboat Arabia for today - then we headed down to the Heritage Trail Bridge (GCVZ82) but couldn't find a place close to park due to all of the road/utility work in the area. Ok - now - I explained that we were very near a Cytex cache... one that has become the most recent vain of my existence - so we headed over to General Orders No.11 (GC13C0C) - hunted high and low - GiraffeGirl even tried to get some help from Cypolusa on the phone - with no luck. We left in defeat.... DEFEAT. I'm beginning to really loathe this little piece of downtown.
Neither of us wanting to end the day on a sour note, we dropped by and picked up another micro just a couple of blocks away - Spice Market (GCZKA1) -- GiraffeGirl spied it. Cute little area of downtown. We made a run for just one more - and headed over to grab the Wall Street (GCMZXJ) cache. We had to hunt for a little while before I spied this one. It is fairly evident that previous cachers have also had some trouble on this one. This cache is located in Case Park, which affords some absolutely stunning views overlooking the confluence of the Kansas River and the Mighty Missouri River, the Kansas City Downtown Airport, and the railyards. There is a fantastic Lewis and Clark memorial in the park, as well as lots of picnic areas and playground areas. This was a perfect end to another wonderful caching trip. Ended the day with a total of 188 cache finds.