Best Western Adventures

Series 4

BEND BUGS

We finally reached Bend around 11 pm. This night, we had no trouble with our reservations. I volunteered to bring up the suitcases and when I came back in the hotel room, all three dudes were fast asleep on the beds, fully clothed. It looked like they had just fallen down on the beds. I didn't blame them. After so much traveling and so little sleep, I was pretty worn out, too.

That morning is one of the brightest memories of the trip, a little glittering moment to hang on to. I wish I had taken a picture to remember it by but it really was such a mundane thing that seemed so awesome to me. It was an open window in the bathroom, and smelling, feeling that cool, crisp mountain air, and seeing the Three Sisters, still covered with snow, in the near distance. The above picture is the closest approximation, courtesy of Flickr.
I was so eager to use a computer that I got up before everyone and raced down to the hotel lobby so I could log my (four) finds from yesterday and virtually drop my travel bugs before someone else picked them up. The APE cache gets hit about five times a day, so travel bugs and geocoins will move very quickly there, and the owners of such items are typically very concerned about accurate movements and mileage.

After everyone had their fill of fruit, muffins, and orange juice, it was time to do a little geocaching before leaving town. My husband was getting really antsy to get to his hometown, so I took another hit in the interest of time and scaled back to the bare minimum caches I wanted to get before leaving town.

The main geocache I wanted to get to was called Area 51. The reason I was particularly intrigued by this one is because our first travel bug reached its mission by being placed in this cache. I talked about this in my "Travel Bug Feature #1" blog entry. Our travel bug actually sat in this geocache for over six months before being picked up about six weeks before our arrival by Reeking Marauders, who said they were taking it to Idaho and then back to Bend. This picture is a view from the geocache that was uploaded by another finder.

The cache was actually an ammo can hidden in a rocky outdropping on top of a little hill in a very odd location. Only the littlest one wanted to go out looking for it with me, but he got freaked out by his surroundings and wanted to be carried up the hill, and boy, was I really feeling the effects of my mountain hike the day before. My legs felt like jello as I was carrying that two year old up the mild hill.

I was hoping to find some travel bugs, but the ones that were listed in the geocache were actually not really there. This is exactly why it is important to log trackable movements quickly and accurately. Even so, I left one of the geocoins I brought from Texas there.

After this, we drove north through the center of Bend to one last cache, one called Travel Bug Village. I was hoping to grab some more travel bugs to bring back with me to Texas. There were about six trackables listed in the cache on the website, but only three in the cache when I found it. I was disappointed that none of them were ones that I could really assist on their mission. I took two of them anyway, one that wanted to go to California then Florida (gee, should have had this one two months ago, right?) and another that wanted to see the great mountain ranges of the west.

I had planned on taking Highway 20 east out of town, heading straight for the in-laws. My husband, however, had other plans. He really wanted to head straight for Klamath Falls, the town he considers home and where most of his family and friends live.

I had not planned on taking that route, and therefore, had no caches loaded for this leg of the trip, but I decided to roll with it and instead concentrate on a food fantasy. We lived outside of Klamath Falls for a year, and then actually in town for two years, and I missed some of my favorite Pacific Northwest eateries. We had been having this running conversation about these places, the places you never see anywhere else, and I thought good and hard about which one I wanted to have lunch at.

Two or three hours later, we were sitting in Abby's Pizza, having lunch with my husband's best friend, his new wife, and the children. And boy, was it good.....