Tom's Takeover Tuesday - 6/1

Here we are again on another glorious Tuesday! Let's not waste time and get to this last week's festivities!

This week was looking pretty slim in the FTF realm until last night. Since last Tuesday I had only amassed one FTF. Well, as of today the last 4 finds were all FTF's! One FTF yesterday was a 3-way with WindingPath and another local FTFer. When I arrived they had already been to the first part and were on to the final part of the find. I immediately joined in the hunt, and Ryan was the one to pull it out. Then there were 3 FTF's today...

FTF #1: In Frontier Park in Graham, which is open from 7:30 AM-dusk. Jay (fozroc) and I made the trek to the cache at *cough* 11:30 PM, pulling out the cache at 12:05 AM. FTF #49, woohoo! Cache for the day done until...

FTF #2: Two caches posted 8+ and 11+ miles from our house at about 7:30 AM. I woke up around 8:30 AM and no one had claimed the finds yet...looks like I'm heading out! The first one was in Federal Way along a gravel road in heavy stickers. I walked past it at first, but went back to the most logical point of entry, and there it was for me to grab! FTF #50 and official pseudo FTF-hound retirement! Except there is the case of this other posted cache...

FTF #3: This one had been DNF'd moments before I started headed down to it. Awesome, still there for me to claim! I get to GZ and have the same initial reaction as the DNFer, it must be behind these trees and it can't possibly be on the potentially movable object! Why is the GPS telling me to go closer to the road? Then I see it! Right where I know it isn't, but plain as day right in front of me. FTF #51 and find #600! Now the FTFs will be a little less frequent and way closer to home.

So now that the FTF highlights for the week are done I can talk about the real fun this last week!

Friday marked the beginning of could potentially be an annual summer vacation event. We bought 3 travel tags and 3 cars to attach them to. Then we handed two of the cars over to local caching families for a little contest. From the beginning of Memorial Day weekend to the end of Labor Day weekend we will see who can log the most miles on their family's racer going from cache to cache all summer. The losing family will host the other families for dinner. The Irish family (ImLuckiest) and the McMorrow family (TheMcMorrows) are our competition this year! The McMorrows got a jump start on the event Friday by going down to Oregon where the Original Stash Tribute Plaque is located. Our weekend plans got changed around a little though which allowed us to make the same trip on Saturday. More on that in a little bit. The Irishes stayed in the area, but still managed to log over 130 miles during the weekend! After the first weekend this is shaping up to be quite the competition, I can't wait to see what the rest of the summer holds!

Now about Saturday! Lynette, as usual, will be in charge of loading the pictures for this, but it was a great day!

We piled into the car around 7 AM with Kelly, Mason, and Eli (psykokiwi, macemakiao, and EagerSeeker) heading for Oregon! We had mapped out 28 caches for the day in the hopes that we might get to about 15. We also made a couple stops in WA to work on a couple challenges we have been working on since last August. After 15 caches, (including two freebies we didn't plan on getting) we made it to the Original Stash Tribute Plaque and the Un-Original Stash. This was about 1 PM and the hunger bug had struck many hours earlier, but we persevered until we got a little closer to civilization!

After the OSTP, we found 5 more caches on our way back to Oregon City. Then it was BurgerVille time! (We highly recommend it, the closest one is in Centralia.) After BurgerVille we went to Washington Park in Portland to finish up our planned caches in OR. Then off we went to get the last couple caches in WA to end the day. When we got to the last cache we realized we had found 29 caches for the day! We couldn't end on the odd number so we found another one in town to make a clean 30! Then we headed to Farrelli's in DuPont for dinner (this is at about 8 PM btw. :p) After dinner we fueled up and headed home to finish our day, and what a day it had turned out to be!

That about covers this week. It had a little more content than normal, but Lynette yelled at me last week for leaving out our day trip last week to complete a couple counties and DeLorme pages for our challenges!

So there you have it. Another successful TTT! See you next week! (at a little slower pace probably. :D)