Our Tsunami!

I keep getting behind on my updates!  It's not that I'm super-busy, it's just that by the time I get home, I'm ready to relax and take a break.

 

Last weekend, 26-28 February, was a great weekend!  We went over to the coast (Pacific Beach) on Friday.  We geocached along the way and had a lot of fun just getting there!  Once we were there, we were supposed to stay in a military resort hotel place that was perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean, but they were booked solid so we found a little place down the street a few miles.  This place was called the Sandpiper Inn and it was fantastic.  Our room was a ground level room that face the ocean.  At high tide, the water was less than a football field away.  Our room itself was spartan - with a drop down bed, fireplace, and bathroom and not much else (including cell service!).  But it was nice to get away for a bit.

 

We met up with some friends and searched for a place to eat.  Contrary to what we'd been told, Pacific Beach closes down by 6pm and getting a decent bite to eat after that takes a 20 minute drive down to Ocean Shores (where the party lasts all night!  Or until about 9pm - whichever is earlier).  We had a great meal at the Homeport Restaurant - so much food that we needed two big take-home containers for it all.  It was fantastic.  We closed down the restaurant (at 9:30) and headed back up the coast.  On the way out, I had some food stuck in my tooth, so I used a toothpick to dig it out - and also managed to pop the top off of a filling.  I babied it until we got back to the hotel.  We dropped off our friends at their hotel and went back to our room for a nightcap of Mike's Hard Lemonade.  My tooth hole felt like the Grand Canyon, but it was really just a little bit indented.  I'll have to get it fixed sometime.  In our hotel room, we poured up drinks, started a fire in the fireplace, and layed down to enjoy the evening.  We promptly fell asleep to the soothing sounds of the ocean waves coming in for high-tide and the soft, steady sound of the logs cracking in the fire.

 

The next day we awoke and had some coffee on the front porch, overlooking the ocean.  It was there that our phones actually picked up a little reception and started pinging with all of the information we missed in the night.  I managed to find one spot in the room, up high on a window-sill, where our phones each had one bar of reception.  We layed back down to let the phones get caught up with everything.  After about 40 pings on Sarahann's phone, we gathered that something might be up.

 

Imagine our surprise when we found out that there had been a massive earthquake off the coast of Chili and that a tsunami was headed our way!  We quickly scoured all of the information we could find in order to determine the level of our peril.  After a lot of checking, we determined it was safe to stay and attend the chocolate festival up in Pacific Beach.  The tsunami wasn't due to arrive until the afternoon.

 

We went back up to Pacific Beach and found the place to be packed with cars and people milling around and a line running outside the local highschool (where the chocolate festival had to be moved because of the tsunami and weather).  We drove around town, looking for our friends to meet up with, but couldn't find them.  We guessed they went to the chocolate festival and so we found a nearby parking spot and got in line.  After a few minutes, our friends popped out of the festival!  They told us all about it, and we made plans to meet up a bit later. 

 

The chocolate festival was a big collection of booths and tables, with chocolatiers displaying their goodies and even letting us sample some.  Oddly enough, the only thing I found that I really needed from the chocolate festival was a violin.  Who sells violins at a chocolate festival?  Some guy from Oregon.  But they are refurbished violins and so they are cheap!  I don't know how to play the violin, but I think I just might have to learn.  I know how much good musical instruments cost, and the violin was a good one and the price was great.  Sarahann did manage to find some chocolate for us at the festival.  I got a violin.

 

After the festival, we met up with our friends, and walked the beaches, waiting for the tsunami!  As it turns out, the tsunami for our area was a whopping few inches - but we get to say we were there, none the less!

 

Our friends had a formal dinner to go to, so they got all dressed up and we decided to head down to Ocean Shores.  Along the way, we hit geocache after geocache!  It's always fun to see where they take you.  For one, I had to climb up in to the roots of a tree on a hillside, for another we had to sift through colored rocks, and for a couple others, we drove down the beach and searched through the dunes.  We failed to find two caches after extensive looking - and that is always frustrating.  Towards the end of our geocaching day, we happened upon a cache on a bridge.  It was supposed to be relatively easy - I mean, it was on a bridge, in the middle of a small pond near a high school, how hard could it be?  When we first walked up, we thought we knew right where it had to be - there were two large pipes coming out of the water anchoring the bridge in place.  We checked the pipes and found a pen!  We thought we had to be close.  One of the pipes had an aluminum can in it - facedown.  We've seen some tricky caches before, and we thought this might be one of them.  We started filling the pipe up in order to float the can to the top of the pipe.  When our hands couldn't get the job done, I took off my hat and dipped it into the water.  Somehow I managed to get it backwards and didn't make any progress on the task.  SA took the hat, filled it up and used the bill to pour water into the pipe.  It worked perfectly!  The can floated to the top and we pulled it out triumphantly!  And then we made our discovery - it was just a can, in a pipe.  Damn.  We kept searching.  It was starting to rain.

 

*GEOCACHING SPOILER ALERT - IF YOU ARE GOING GEOCACHING IN THE PACIFIC BEACH OR OCEAN SHORES AREA - DON'T READ THIS PARAGRAPH*

 

I pulled up the cache history on my phone, checking the back logs for some clue or hint, but everyone only mentioned how tricky the cache was.  Damn.  We checked under the bridge, used flashlights to reflect light underneath, and still came up empty.  Then we noticed that some of the support beans for the low rail were missing pins.  We started kicking them to see if they were loose.  Nothing budged.  Finally, we noticed that one of the blocks didn't fit the pattern of support for the bridge and investigated further.  After a bit of nudging, the block moved outward and revealed its secret!  It was a piece of wood that had been hollowed out and how held a plastic cache container.  Yay!  We found it!  Those kind are always the most satisfying finds.

 

*OK, YOU CAN GO BACK TO READING NOW*

 

As it got dark, we entered back into Ocean Shores for a Subway dinner and decided that it was time to get home.  On the way, we found some more caches, including one behind a Department of Transportation sign.  The strange thing is that there was also a shovel, full size, digging type, bolted to the back of the sign.  Weird.  I still don't know why it is there.  We made it home, safe and sound and ready for a relaxing Sunday.

 

Here's the short version of work last week:

I walked around the motorpool and company area with a big book of numbers going blind trying to figure out how many cables of what size go with which piece of equipment and making sure they are all still there.  Ta-da!

 

Now, if I just do this weekend's update soon, I won't be so far behind!