Knoxville 4×4

For whatever reason, I woke up this morning long before the alarm was set to go off. Figured I might as well go have some coffee and breakfast, so headed down to the Main Street Bar and Grill in Clearlake.

After breakfast I grabbed my GPSr and a flashlight and walked across the street to the nearest cache, where of all things I found a brand new blank log and a first to find prize. It seemed like an auspicious start to a long day of caching. I hunted down 2 more caches before getting to Big O Tires as they opened in order to get my flat tire repaired.

As soon as they dismounted the tire from the rim it was apparent the tire was not repairable—it had a 1.5″ slice through the tread and steel belts. They couldn’t get a replacement for a couple of days, so I had to make it through the day (and the drive home) with no spare. At least Big O didn’t charge me a thing for their work.

After Big O, all of us met up again and headed for the meeting point at Knoxville. Of course, we stopped and found four caches on the way.

Our little caravan of 5 vehicles joined another 5 vehicles at the entrance to Knoxville. Dan had hitched a ride up with ProTechCC, so he joined me for the rest of day in the Ridgeline. The dynamics of a 4×4 cache hunt with this many vehicles was quite different from yesterday. In general, by the time the last vehicles had parked, the cachers in the front vehicles had found the cache and signed the log.

We (the group) found 24 caches before we were back to Knoxville Berryessa road. At this point, several folks called it a day, but Dan and I jumped in bthomas’ Jeep and went back to get 3 caches on a nearby side road at dusk.

Back at my Ridgline, bthomas, and ProTechCC agreed to cache with us as we drove the road towards Lake Berryessa. We picked up another 18 caches on that drive, all done by flashlight.

At that point, Dan and I headed for home because I wanted to be back by 10 PM. The others cached some more around Lake Berryessa. Still, this was my high cache find day, with a total of 52.