but look! Wouldn’t this hidey hole be a great spot to hide a cache?” I asked.
“Yes, it would except for one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“If you put one here then you’d be forcing other people to climb this hill, too.”
“Oh… yeah. I guess I don’t want to do that.”
“You wouldn’t want to maintain it either,” he pointed out.
“I’m getting thirsty,” I said.
“You didn’t bring any water?”
“No, we just left a café, we were only going to look for one geocache, and we were only going to be eight hundred feet from the car. Why would I need water?”
“Always bring water.”
“Do you have any?” I asked.
“Uh, no. We were going to look for a cache at a bridge over a river, so I didn’t bother.”
“Okay,” I huffed. “Next time we bring water. For now we must press on.”
Ten minutes later, “Now I see why you wear hiking boots.”
And half an hour later we stumbled out onto the road glad it didn’t have a lot of traffic on it.
“That water looks so good,” I said as I limped and jogged my way to the river bank. I stripped off my tennis shoes and stuck my aching feet into the water. “Ahhh, that’s better.”
“I thought you said you were thirsty,” Twiggy said.
“I guess my feet were thirstier than my throat.”
“I wouldn’t drink from this creek anyway, unless I really had to. Too many mysterious microbes.”
“I’ll feel better when my feet get a rest. The water’s nice and cool. You should try it.”
“You have ankles,” he said.
“Of course I have ankles!”
“You always wear pants. You’re always covered up. I just knew you had ankles under there somewhere but I’d never seen them.”
“I have elbows, too!” I joked.
“Ah, but do you have shoulders? What about knees? Do you have knees?”
I splashed a little water in his direction and pulled my feet out of the river to dry them.
“The bridge is…”
“I can see the bridge. It’s not far. We’d already be there if we had walked the road, or driven.”
“Sorry, guess I could have chosen better,” I said.
“It’s okay. I liked climbing a hill with you.”
I think I blushed a little. “So, are you ready to go find the geocache?” I asked as I began pulling on my socks and shoes.
“Ready when you are,” he said.
I tied my shoe laces and pushed myself up, then brushed off my pants.
“To the road?”
“Yes, the road seems a good choice, now that we have climbed the hill.”
“But we saw hidey holes and gnome homes and toadstools.”
“Oh my!”
The old bridge was rickety, patched, and reinforced providing hundreds of gaps and ledges that could hold a geocache.
“What does the GPS say?” Twiggy asked.
“Here,” I said as I handed it over. “You said when we get close we should rely on geosenses.”
“That’s right, but the GPS can still be helpful. It will at least pin it down to the right part of the bridge.”
“How can the cache be where the sun doesn’t shine if the river flows bank to bank?”
“That doesn’t mean the water level was that high when they hid the cache. What’s the terrain rating?”
He handed the GPS unit back to me so I could see for myself.
“Three,” I read.
“So that means it takes some effort.”
“We already did that climbing the hill,” I point out.
“But they thought we would drive to the bridge, so you can’t count the hill. We have to assume that even if we parked at the bridge there’s still some effort involved in finding it.”
“But how do we look for it if it’s under the bridge?” I asked.
“I don’t know about you, but I’m goin’ swimming!” he said as he took off his hiking boots. I began looking in the weeds beside the river when he started taking off his pants. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed he was wearing boxers as he waded out into the river.
I called it a river and he called it a creek. I didn’t see many rivers but to me a creek was a little trickle. This was a wide, flowing expanse of water and Twiggy was up to his hips in the cold water as he neared the bridge.
“I do declare this to be a three terrain,” he said as he slipped and slid over the algae coated rocks under the water. He craned his neck trying to see the underside of the bridge and remain upright. I decided, since he had the underside covered and there were a lot of spots you could see right through it, that I would stay drier if I searched from above.
“The sun shines up there,” Twiggy shouted.
“I’m using geosenses,” I called back.
When I stuck my arm through a hole in the bridge he said, “Whoa, do you think that bridge is safe?”
Just then a pickup truck came bumping down the road. The driver pulled to a stop when he saw me kneeling on the bridge with my arm through the hole.
He opened his door and got out. He stood there scratching his head.
“Miss? Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, just lost something. That’s all,” I replied.
“Maybe you oughta stay offa the bridge. It isn’t entirely safe.”
“Okay,” I said and backed off the bridge.
The man got back in his truck and drove across. When he reached my side of the river he asked, “What did you lose?”
“Uhh…” I had to think. I just used the lost item excuse because I wasn’t supposed to talk about geocaching.
