Well kiddies...as a follow up to my goals for this year...
I went and visited the doctor today. It was standard really.
- First off I spent 20 minutes in the waiting room. That's actually lightening speed...my record is around a hour.
- Then I got to spend 30 minutes sitting by myself in the little examining room feeling claustrophobic and bored. I really thought about playing with some of the gizmos and generally being a menace. Next time.
- Truthfully, I like my doctor. She's a sweet lady that means well...but I think she doctors through guilt and badgering. I've heard the wrath so many times that I anticipate what's coming and have found a way to take everything so calmly, cool and collective that I'm pretty sure it pisses off my poor physician. I just can't help myself.
- Finally, they asked a few odd questions on my way out. I'm pretty sure my health is so out of whack that they are sizing me up for a body bag. God I love my doctors.
While I joke a little about all this, I won't lie. It did bum me out. I don't like looking like me, or feeling like me...and in my heart I want to change. It's just that will power thing I can't seem to muster. Anyway...I'm going somewhere with this.
So...my original plan was to do the doctors, and hopefully get out of there with a little time so I could find a cache today. I call them zero days (which is similar to when a thru-hiker takes a day off from the trail...only in this instance, it's a day that I've not found a cache before). So basically on March 10th, of any year since I've started caching, I've never logged a find. My goal post-doctor was to fill my zero day!
Zero days in the winter can be difficult. Most caches aren't winter accessible, but you'd never know as they often times don't indicate one way or another on the cache page. Other times if they do have a "findable in winter" attribute, what they really meant was that if the ratio of snow flakes per acre were 3 to 1, you'd probably still be able to find this cache without issue. Anyway, with the snow going away (thankfully!!), I decided my cache would be:
Thorpe Manor by WildWilly which is located in Emery Park in the not really known for much of anything town of South Wales.
I had "figured" out this puzzle cache a week or so earlier. It was dumb luck really, because I'm pretty sure I've made my incompetence for solving puzzles pretty well known. After finally escaping the doctor's office, I headed north. Lucky for me, most of the roads in the park appeared to be open. This meant I could get within 700 feet or so from the cache. Normally I wouldn't care - as what's a half mile or so - but I really didn't want to deal with rain or the lasting remnants of any slushy snow in the woods. The rain held out actually for the first hundred feet, but after that it went from drizzle, to steady, to downpour. There was some snow in the woods, but not too deep...which made me happy. Anyways, in the end I was able to find a nice ammobox in the woods and promptly made haste back to the dry interior of the Pathfinder.
The "long story short" with all this, is that I hit the trail. Even if it was briefly, I was outside. All part of what I hope becomes more and more of an occurrence as the weather gets nicer. I need to be outdoors - I need to hike - I need to rediscover a more healthy me.
~Szuchie
