Getting Carried Away In Bismack

This past weekend Erin and I took Lindzee out to Bismarck to do some geocaching.  Saturday morning Erin was doing some family stuff while Linzee and I snagged some first to finds. There was one we struggled with and even emailed the cache owner for a hint.  The hint didn't really give us anything other than what was on the cache page, but since it was on our way back to the truck we stopped by again and found it within 30 seconds.  Linzee and I laughed at how we had missed it the first time. After lunch we met up with Erin and decided to do a few caches in Mandan near the river.  Erin and I had been out on this particular trail before and grabbed most of the caches in the area, so the first cache we were going for was 1.4 miles from where we parked the truck.  The hike was nice, and after some bushwhacking we found a couple of caches. The trail continued out into the river and around the bridge, and there were caches on the other side so we continued our journey.  The caches on the south side of the bridge were a little more challenging, and we spent about half an hour trying to get into a locked cache. We even called the cache owner and confirmed we had the right combination, but the lock just wouldn't open.  When we finished with that it was a bit later than what we'd planned and the girls wanted to see if we could hike out to the south and have Erin's dad give us a ride to the truck.  Lindzee put in a bunch of work figuring out where we were, where we needed to go, and directions for Erin's dad.  After another half mile of hiking and a bit of waiting on the side of a road Erin's family showed up to give us a ride back to the truck.  They said they hadn't been to the part of Mandan where they picked us up, or where the truck was.  It's amazing the places geocaching takes you to.  After our adventure we hit up Mackenzie River for supper. Stacey seemed disappointed in her chicken sandwich, but the rest of us enjoyed our food. After supper we grabbed a few more caches and brought Erin to the other cache we had missed earlier in the day.  After another search we still couldn't find it so we went home to log caches.  I emailed the cache owner and she updated the cache page with a picture and a better hint.  From the picture I knew exactly where it was, and we decided to go grab one last first to find to end the day.  15 minutes later we had found it, signed the log and were driving away. The coords were about 50 feet off which is why we hadn't made the find earlier.  It was nice being able to find this after all of the searching we did earlier.

2013 Vacation Day 10

Saturday morning we woke up in our own beds and started unpacking all of our stuff from our trip. Inspired from our meal at Va Bene I recreated the pizza with a bit of a twist of my own for lunch.  It turned out fantastic. When we finished eating we headed off to the Red River Valley Fair to see John perform with his band.  It was his first public performance and he did very well. After he played we spent a little bit of time exploring the fair until the Deltener boys performed.  We enjoyed the show and the chance to talk with Kelly and Justin.  I was very surprised to see his crazy old mountain man style beard.  On our way back home we stopped at big lots for some Jolly Rancher pop that we had discovered on vacation.  I was glad to see they had it, even it they were missing some flavors. We were bumming around the house preparing for a lazy evening when I got a call from the Pirates.  They were in town caching and just wanted to give us crap for one of our hides.When I talked to them, they suggested grabbing supper, so we met art Marco's Pizza. The service was great and we had a great time talking with everyone.  The kids are all super talkative and we could have stayed there all night chatting. This wound up being the perfect ending to our 2013 vacation.

2013 Vacation Day 9

Friday morning, our last morning in the bed and breakfast started like the others.  I would wake up a bit before Erin and catch up on email, eventually she woke up and breakfast was delivered. After breakfast we didn't have much reason to stick around so we packed up and hit the road.  The plan was to camp at Saint Croix state park for a night or two and then head home.  On our way out of town we stopped by Target to pick up another phone charger since the one we had was acting a bit flakey.  From there we went to Jay Cooke state park to grab the multicache there.  The hike was beautiful, and we both decided that we should come back someday to camp here. After the hike and cache we hit the road again on our way to Moose Lake state park and another multi cache. Just before getting to the park we found a restaurant called the Lazy Moose and stopped for lunch.  The food was fairly good, and the view was fantastic, looking out over a river with a small island on it.  Our caching adventure in Moose Lake ended prematurely because of mosquitos and previous logs mentioned we'd be getting into some messy mud.  From there another state park, this time Banning State Park.  The park looked nice, but it was getting hot out and the bugs were really bothering us.  After finding the cache we decided we'd be happier heading for home instead of camping.  On the way back we stopped at 3 more state parks for the avian adventure multi caches, Father Hennipin, Mille Lacs Kathio, and Charles Lindberg. It was a lot of fun visiting so many state parks in one day and it was nice to find so many multi caches.  As the sun was going down and we were nearing Detroit Lakes we approached a thunderstorm.  We were lucky to avoid most of the rain from it, and it appeared to be going past us, so we stopped for a late supper at Perkins.  After supper when we hit the road again round 2 of the storm rolled through.  The hard rain wasn't the most enjoyable to drive through, especially where there was construction on highway 10, but we made it home safely from our trip.

2013 Vacation Day 8

Gooseberry Falls

After dealing with the parking nightmare that Duluth was we decided to get out of town and head to Gooseberry Falls for some hiking and geocaching. After eating breakfast I loaded up the Garmins and we set out on our day trip.  When we arrived in Gooseberry I discovered that I didn't have as many caches loaded up as I thought I did.  We made the best of it, and found the ones in the park and had a very enjoyable hike. When it started to heat up we decided to cache along the way back to Duluth.  Oddly enough a few of the caches we found had just been found by a friend from Moorhead just a few days prior to our visit.  It was neat seeing a familiar name on the log sheet.  When we made it back to Duluth it was supper time.  We went to the black bear for supper.  The view from the restaurant was nice and the food was good, but I was a little disappointed.  After supper we called it an early night since we were both pretty tired.

2013 Vacation Day 7

The view from a cache along the Superior Hiking Trail

We woke up and bummed around until 9:00 when breakfast was delivered.  It was pretty good except for the ham in the eggs.  Seriously, canadian bacon is NOT bacon!  After breakfast grabbed a few caches on our way over to Superior, WI to grab a cache, and play some mini golf.  While not nearly as cool as Pirates Cove we still had fun playing and I recorded another win.  From there we decided to head back to Canal park to shop and checkout the downtown area.  This wound up be way harder then it should have been.  I missed a turn and then couldn't get back to where we wanted to be.  Eventually we found a parking garage and decided to park there before discovering they were full after circling the lot a few times. Finally we made it back to canal park and had lunch at Grandma's again.  From there our wandering began.  There were a few moderately interesting shops in the area, but overall I wasn't too impressed.  We walked over in the skyway to downtown a found the skyway to be depressing.  It seemed to have a lot of closed down shops and vacancies. I wonder if the skyway is getting any return on the investment they made putting it in.  There was a car show/street fair going on downtown.  After that we returned to the truck and decided that we weren't all that hungry for supper.  Instead of going someplace fancy for our anniversary we stopped by a grocery store and got some donuts and milk and went back to the B&B. It was an oddly appropriate way to cap off the day.