Geocaching is a sport/game with a social responsibility. A central part of geocaching is the principle of "Cache In, Trash Out" (or CITO). When you're out in the woods, or in a park, looking for a hidden cache, you are expected to pick up and carry out any trash you find along the way. Every year, on Earth Day, geocaching.com sponsors CITO events, in which geocachers get together and voluntarily clean up parks.

We started geocaching just a few days too late to join any of last year's CITO events. Today is Earth Day, and today we participated in a CITO event in Kent's Mill Creek Park. At last count, there were 30 people cleaning up the park - mostly geocachers, but also several Girl Scouts. I think there were more than 30 people. We're both tired, but we're both glad we did it.

After the CITO event was over, Phillip and I went to Red Robin for lunch. Phillip had a coupon for $3.00 off our bill. When the waitress brought our check, I noticed that she'd forgotten to deduct our coupon. I called her over, and she was very apologetic and took the check back with no hesitation. When she brought the second check to us, it seemed lower than I expected it to be. Maybe I had remembered the first total incorrectly, or maybe I hadn't looked at the coupon closely enough. I handed her my credit card. The waitress returned with my receipt and left again. When I looked at the bill closely, I realized that she had deducted $8.99 - the price of one hamburger. I added in a good tip and signed the receipt, because I still wasn't sure if I was remembering the coupon correctly. As we walked out to the car, I asked Phillip if the coupon had been three dollars off, or two for one. Phillip said the coupon was indeed for only $3.00 off. I wonder now if the waitress had made a second mistake, or if she had over-corrected the error on purpose. I just hope she doesn't get in trouble over it.

Every time I think about our past Eastern Washington weekend, I want to go back and do it again. (Maybe include Ellensburg next time?) It was my kind of trip - very little was planned (we knew we'd be staying overnight, but didn't know where), not everything went right (I prefer adventures to vacations), some things went wrong, but we all lived to tell the tale. I would have liked to have slowed down and enjoyed the scenery along the way more, but that's a lesson for next time. We overdid the geocaching, but that was like (in my love of analogies) eating too much at a nice restaurant. It doesn't mean you didn't enjoy the meal, or that dinner was a disaster, and it doesn't mean that you'll never go out to dinner ever again. It just means you should remember to not eat so much next time. I'm feeling a little burned out on geocaching right now, but I'll get hungry again soon.

Geocaching adds a lot to a vacation. It takes you down streets you might otherwise not know about.

(You know, the more I think about it, the more screwy that 80/20 sightseeing/caching ratio, that I wrote about earlier, seems. I never was very good at visualizing numbers. I think I meant something more like 60/40. Or maybe that's off, too.)

Phillip and I went out to a concert last night to benefit Multifaith Works. The concert was called "Many Voices, One Song." The concert was at Seattle First Baptist - my favorite Baptist church.

I enjoyed the concert very much. There was a Japanese drum band, an African-American gospel choir, a men's chorus, a youth group, and an Eastern European Jewish band. We got the tickets from one of the Social Workers at work. We saw a few of my co-workers there, and during intermission, I once again found myself hanging out with the Social Workers. There were also quite a few patients from our clinic there, and I would have enjoyed talking with them away from the hospital - but with Phillip there, it could have been a breech of confidentiality for me to approach them. So, I waited for them to approach me, which a few did.

I had a nice lunch today. I bought a cheese sandwich to go from the cafeteria, and walked over to St. James Cathedral, where there's nice, quiet little courtyard between the cathedral and the bookstore. There's a pretty fountain there, and a nice breeze that would not have felt good a few days ago, when it was cooler.

There is a geocacher in our area who has been a bit of a mystery to us ever since we started geocaching. This geocacher joined geocaching about two or three years ago, and has logged less than a dozen finds. That's not so unusual - some people join and discover the sport/game just isn't for them. What is unusual is that this geocacher has several active caches, that he or she quickly maintains. We've found most of these caches - they all have a distinct personality to them. So it seemed that this geocacher doesn't enjoy finding geocaches, hasn't hidden anything lately, and yet is active enough in geocaching to respond to needed cache repairs. Why keep an account just to maintain caches? That was the mystery.

The mystery may be solved. There is possible scenario that I didn't considered, and that one turned out to be the case. From now on, I will look at multiple-person accounts differently.

I had that recurring dream again this morning. It's the dream in which a group of friends and I (all unseen) are on a road trip, we're at a crossroads, and we're looking at a map, planning our next route. In the one this morning, we were in a mountainous country in Europe. We were trying to decide if we should take the bicycle trail to our left, or if we should ride the cable cars up the mountain to our right.

It began with a geocaching travel bug we picked up a month ago. This bug's goal was to visit small towns that have a "claim to fame." Phillip had the idea of taking it to Zillah, home of the Teapot Dome Service Station, the oldest operating gas station in the USA. (It closed in 2003, however, so I'm not sure what that makes it now - Maybe the oldest American gas station still in existence?) We decided to wait for pass conditions to improve, so we emailed the travel bug owner to let him know we had plans, but there might be a delay. The owner was fine with that.

Our day trip to Zillah soon evolved into a trip to Zillah with Pet, then to an overnight stay somewhere on the road, to a Friday night at Pet's and a Saturday night on the road somewhere. Of course, we'd do some geocaching along the way. I was envisioning a trip sort of like our trip to the ocean: 80% sightseeing and 20% geocaching. (I found out, after the trip, that Phillip had that same vision.) I picked out three caches in Zillah, and two or three along Highway 12. Phillip requested a couple that looked interesting to him. I figured that Pet would pick out caches, too, and that there would be some duplications in our list, but that we'd end up with a nice list. I picked out fairly easy caches that didn't involve long hikes into the woods. What neither of us counted on was Pet's level of enthusiasm for the sport/game.

We spent Friday night at Pet's house, and started out very early Saturday morning. There was snow on the ground, and in the air, between Elbe and Morton, and I became worried. Our car has never proven itself in the snow, we had no tire chains, and we still had to get over White Pass - if we'd be allowed over it at all. But that was the most snow we saw over the whole trip, and there were no more worries.

When we got to Zillah, it suddenly turned out that none of us knew exactly where the Teapot Dome Service Station is. I remembered, someone, at some time, telling me that it's just east of El Ranchito. Pet seemed to remember, from her childhood, it being in the center of the town. After driving around for a while, we spotted a woman walking her dog. We pulled over and asked for directions. She gave us very good directions.

We learned that there are two Zillah exits, (we'd only ever taken the first one), and that finding the service station is as easy as following the large brown signs that read "National Historic Place." Furthermore, the service station is visible from the highway. We took lots of photographs, and logged the travel bug into a Zillah geocache.

Now, here's a mystery that I think I may have solved just by typing that last paragraph. While we were at the Teapot Dome, Phillip remarked that it was open the last time we were there. I, however, had no memory of ever being there. I knew we'd both seen photographs of it, but why did Phillip think we'd actually been there? Typing this blog entry, it just occurred to me: It's visible from the highway. Phillip must have seen it while we were driving past at some time, and I was driving and didn't look over to see it.

Like I wrote earlier, we hadn't counted on our friend's enthusiasm for geocaching. Somehow, by the time we checked into a motel in Zillah Saturday evening, we had looked for, and found, thirteen geocaches - far above whatever our previous caches-in a-day record had been. (I'm guessing that our record had been five or six in a day.) We had done maybe 2% sightseeing and 98% geocaching. Phillip and I were both ready to call it a day and go out to dinner. Pet, however, wanted to keep finding more. We let her talk us into one more geocache on our way to El Ranchito. We found fourteen geocaches on Saturday.

I don't know how many lunches I've eaten at El Ranchito. Saturday night was the first time I've ever eaten dinner there. The food, as always, was delicious. I was a little saddened by how much the tourist industry has taken over El Ranchito. The little grocery department was about half the size it was the last time I was there. Spanish is almost completely gone from the menu.

We stayed at a very nice motel in Zillah - far nicer than we needed, far nicer than what we had expected to find in the middle of farming country. (We asked the desk clerk on Sunday morning what kept them in business. His answer was that it was all the wineries in the area.)

We had three or four geocaches left on our list for Sunday. Phillip suggested that I find a couple of more to do, with the help of the motel's free computer. So I added a few more, and then Pet added a few more, and we ended up looking for, and finding, nine geocaches on Sunday. Pet had three more that she wanted to do, but Phillip and I called it quits.

On Sunday morning, we took a tour of the Yakima Nation cultural museum. That was the only sightseeing we did the whole weekend that was not connected to geocaching. We took a tour of the Darigold cheese factory in Sunnyside, but only after finding a cache nearby.

When we got home Sunday afternoon, I took a nap, and then I spent most of the evening logging our 23 finds, and uploading photographs associated with some of the finds.

All in all, it was a terrific weekend. It was fun to get away from all the urban micro puzzle caches and do some traditional, regular caches in the woods. I just think we overdid the geocaching.