The Trifecta, part deux

The Best Western Inn in Sandy, OR, has very comfortable beds.

After completing the first leg of the trifecta, we drove to Seattle and made it to the coordinates with a half hour to spare. This was good, because we (well, ok, just the grown-ups) were stiff from the morning's hike and it was nice to not have to hurry.

Rich at the entrance way.


I wonder where we are going?


The boys in front of the treasure chest of travel bugs!


That was the last picture I took inside. We had a 2pm appointment. When we got there, there must have been about 5 or 6 different caching groups there already! Lots of people, all talking the same language. Ok, both literally (English) and figuratively (caching). We met a cacher from NZ (he had his All Blacks shirt on, it was pretty obvious where he was from) who made the HQ cache his #1000. He told us there were a pair of Aussie women there, and we met them later on. They are Aussies living in Britain, we are Aussies living in Texas, so we had a good chat about dual citizenship and how the US doesn't quite get it. Luckily for us, Australia does. We got the number of the big travel bug in the shot above.

Earlier in the week, Eric from Groundspeak had written asking if we would do a Lost and Found story on our search for the trifecta. I had told him they were welcome to tag along, that we'd be finding all three legs on Friday. He found someone else to follow to the APE cache, but filmed us at HQ and interviewed Richard for the story. Rich did a bang-up job. And then we got a Lackey geocoin! This is a coin which is only given to a select few, and can't be bought. Yay! It was a terrific cap to a terrific visit.

We bought travel bug tags and a couple of small Signal (their mascot) "dolls" (don't tell the boys I called them that!) for the boys. Connor says he doesn't like geocaching, but he does like Signal.

Our seats on the plane were one in row 18 and three in row 29. Andrew got the one by himself. The people next to him told him about the "sky needle" so he was especially excited when we went right by it, intentionally, on the way back to I-5. I have a vague memory of eating dinner in a revolving restaurant at the top of the Space Needle. I hope it's real.

You wonder what part of Seattle you're in now.


Austin traffic is worse than Seattle traffic, but Austin is smaller, so Austin traffic is better than Seattle traffic. We crawled along the I-5 towards Portland, through Tacoma and Olympia. We stopped at an IHOP for supper because we realized we never had lunch and maybe that was the reason we were all getting grouchy. It didn't help the traffic any, and we are sorely hoping it won't be that bad going back north to Vancouver.

We were too tired to get the final leg last night, so we stopped at a nice motel, but we'll find it today, and we'll have found the three legs within a 24 hour period, and that's all good too.