A Birthday Celebration

Pic: Oh, the fun things we do at milestone birthdays!

By Allan Olson

Typically, I’m not a birthday party kind of person. I haven’t celebrated my birthday with any kind of party in a long time. My wife says the last was for my 25th, but even that was a long time ago now – 15 years, to be exact. Yup, that’s right, I’ve officially shut the door on my 30s and have started the downhill slide into my 40s. At least that’s what the calendar says. Personally, I don’t feel any different than I did last week. I have just a few more day’s worth of knowledge; that’s about it.

Since I was told I was going to have a party, I also decided that I was going to do something for me for my birthday – go geocaching with no kids.

Now don’t get me wrong; I like to go geocaching with my kids, but not every geocaching adventure is for them, and frankly, they are all getting older as well and don’t always want to hang out with “the old man,” especially geocaching all day. So about a month ago I started making plans with a friend to tackle some multi-stage caches, with most of them not found in the last 1-2 years, and in one case, three years. 

Our adventure started on Thursday night. He was coming from Roseau, and had one cache in particular to target – one that I hadn’t found yet either. This one was east of Bena, on a forest trail along the Mississippi River north of Highway 2. After work and supper I loaded my vehicle, said goodbye to the family and headed out. My friend doesn’t carry a cell phone, so I stopped at the cache site, knowing that he should’ve been there by now, and set about on a search. I found the cache laying on the ground, and I knew that he had not been there. I checked the log book and didn’t find his signature, so I put my name in it with a time so that if he arrived after me, he would know what time I was there and put the container back up in a tree where it belonged.

My next stop was Schoolcraft State Park. I completed the stages of that cache all while the lightning was crackling around me. I couldn’t wait to get out of all those trees and out into the open, where I felt I was less likely to get hit by a falling branch after lightning struck a tree. Okay, I knew the odds were slim, but still.

My next stop, was at a PWA on the Mississippi River. The cache was about 100 feet into the woods, or so the coordinates led me to believe. I searched for at least 20 minutes and gave up. The rain was coming down, and I needed to get on the road. A break in the rain allowed me to start searching for the first stage of a geocache last found over two years ago. I noticed the grass trampled down ahead of me and I knew it was too much of a coincidence; my friend was ahead of me somewhere. I found the coordinates I was looking for, or so I thought, and headed to the final destination. Ultimately the rain inhibited my search and a landowner questioned what I was doing, noting that I was on private property. He was pleasant enough, but confused at the same time. My phone crashed from being wet. I thanked him for allowing me to look, and headed to Grand Rapids to meet my friend.

I looked around the parking lot where we were scheduled to meet and didn’t see him, so I went in to purchase a few supplies. I still didn’t see him, so I decided I was going to work on a puzzle to save time in the morning. I drove around to several parks in Grand Rapids, well after dark, which probably made it easier, and gathered the necessary information. I returned to the store, parked near his van, and made my bed in my vehicle. A while later he knocked on my window, and we chatted about the lack of success in our finds. I learned that he had also been at the two I failed to find earlier, but didn’t attempt the first one.

The next morning, we were dodging rain showers in the woods in a park, working on finding some “little containers of no importance to anyone but us.” I would describe the day as a mixed bag of success. I contacted people on my friends list about some of the caches that gave us trouble, and in the end we still didn’t find some of them, even after going back twice. 

There were two success stories on our return visit. On one cache we couldn’t locate earlier, the main issue with our prior failure was the lack of light in the sky, plus the coordinates were a little off. On the second one, I failed to locate both sets of coordinates, so instead of going north and west, I just went west and so where I had been searching was nearly directly across the lake from the actual cache location. It was a rookie mistake and I admitted as much, but I was still able to eventually make the find after locating the other half of the coordinates.

I finally pulled back in the yard at home just after 10 p.m. on Friday, happy and tired at the same time.

My birthday party was on Saturday. I made excellent pulled pork, thanks to some advice from a friend, and my wife and daughters made great selections of cake, and there was also a cool camera cake made for me by my sister-in-law. I also grilled hot dogs, brats and burgers on the grill. Abigail learned how to change a tire with my dad and brothers, all the kids played, and I got picked on – a lot. And after most of the guests left, I even had a couple of drinks to finish the evening.  

In case you were wondering, one of my cakes was German Chocolate with coconut pecan frosting made by Alivia, while Abigail made two different selections with peanut butter in them – all were delicious. (They think one is all gone, but I hid it, so hopefully they won’t find it while I’m at work.)

Sunday was Father’s Day, and it was hard for me to get out of bed, but I wanted to go watch the movie Incredibles 2 with the kids, and we had to time the movie with Nikolai’s return to BSU for the week. After we watched the show, we went and grabbed a few more supplies for him, drove around town, dropped him at the college and headed home. I was just getting cozy in my chair with plans to relax for the rest of the evening, when I got a call about an interesting story. I promptly headed out the door and did not return again until dark.

Plans for this weekend, theoretically, are to just stick close to home; however, I’ve been asked to take my niece’s senior photos, so those plans might change. Rest assured, no matter what activities we engage in this summer, we will be taking plenty of photos to document our busy lives. I encourage everyone else to do the same! Thanks for reading, and have a great week! Feel free to drop me a line at cltimes1@arvig.net or stop by the office for a visit.