Go West, Young Man, Go West

Go West, Young Man, Go West
By Allan Olson
Just like in the olden days, the call last weekend was to “go west” (for a one day road trip). No, we didn’t go in search of whiskey, women and gold, but rather to visit our new niece who has opted for an extended stay in the hospital, requiring more care than the smaller local facilities can provide. Since she was born, my wife and I have discussed making the trip to see her, but we were thinking about waiting until she got home – but we didn’t.
We discussed it more on Friday night and finally, after a late night movie, we decided we would head to Grand Forks on Saturday, but on the way there and back we were going to do some geocaching and hit some rummage sales. Oddly(?) the kids seemed more excited about the rummage sale idea than geocaching when we woke them up early the next morning.
We left home about 7 a.m.; my wife and I got about four hours of sleep before the 5:30 a.m. wake-up (it was a late movie) and then started getting the kids ready and things packed for the trip.
We missed the first rummage sale right on our road about halfway to Bemidji, but I wasn’t turning around, so we kept on going. We didn’t see any sales close by in Bemidji, and my rule for both sales and geocaching was that we weren’t going miles out of our way for either.
Back to geocaching. My obsessiveness, as my wife would call it, is that I need to stay ahead of my cousin and his family; since we got them started with it, we should be ahead of them. We are currently at 373 caches and they are at 301. They keep informing me that they are gaining on us, so I really wanted to log some caches this weekend. My main goal was to find – not just attempt, but actually find – one geocache in every town we traveled through (excluding Bemidji). Mission Accomplished. However, it wasn’t always easy to accomplish. Some stops took a minute, others took several.  Our first stop was in Solway, where Marcus spotted a nanocache in a sign. The pastor from a nearby church and a parishioner were curious as to what we were up to, so we clued them in. Our next stop was in Shevlin. My wife spotted the cache location from the road; the rest of us were clueless about what she was so excited about. The cache turned out to be inside an old cellar that was still in nearly perfect shape. I’ve driven by it many times and never even knew it existed; it’s not visible from Highway 2 and only visible in a certain spot if you happen to be looking from the county road. Coming up next was Bagley. We found the right location, Nikolai found the cache, and we got right back on the road. We continued this stop-and-go pattern until Erskine. By that point we had already been on the road for over four hours, twice the amount of time it would take driving straight through.
We were nearly to Grand Forks when we spotted a rest area – a perfect place for lunch, and when we got there it was a double bonus – we found two geocaches, too!One was an earth cache where you answer questions about the area, and the second a normal cache. The “normal” cache was much harder to find than the earth cache, but we managed to do both.
We finally got to the hospital to see our new niece – a beautiful little bundle – and visited for probably close to two hours with family before leaving. We found our first geocache in North Dakota near the hospital before leaving, and our second was in the Sam’s Club parking lot, where a kid biking with his family nearby yelled, “Are you geocaching?” “Yes,” we replied. It takes one to know one. In all, we found 20 geocaches out of 23 attempts – it was a fun trip!
The really interesting part of this trip happened on the way to Grand Forks, in Crookston. I was cruising through town and I happened to see flashing lights behind me. I quickly pulled over, and then thought “Oh, no!” when he pulled in behind me. What did I do? He was quick to inform me that I was apparently doing 46 in a 30, paying too much attention to my conversation with my wife sitting next to me than my speed. He ran my license and came back with a ticket – but thankfully the very kind officer gave me just a warning ticket. “If you weren’t wearing your seat belts, I would’ve given you a ticket,” he said. I thanked him profusely. After that the kids were calling out the speed limits signs all the way to Grand Forks to make sure dad was paying attention.
We didn’t do very well in the rummage sale department. We did manage to hit a couple in Fosston and one in East Grand Forks. If we hadn’t been on a road trip, I likely would’ve grabbed a couple bigger items, but we had no room. The kids are hoping we will visit some rummage sales this weekend; dad is hoping we will reach 400 geocaches. We’ll see what happens.
Thanks for reading, and remember to be safe on the lakes while enjoying the summer. Be sure to spend some time with kids! Thanks for reading, and have a great and safe weekend. For more of my columns visit: http://allan-crazykids.blogspot.com

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