Flavors of Awsomesauce!

Columbus, Magellan, Marco Polo, Neil Armstrong...Throughout history, there are tales of the great explorers who have gone on legendary journeys for the sake of honor, country and fortune.

This is NOT one of those tales. 

Instead, this is the story of 5 friends on a mission to break their own personal records and reach for new milestones!

How do you know you have a geocaching addiction? When you are willing to get up before the sun does, to travel 2 1/2 hours to another state, just to begin a long day of stop and go caching fun for the HWY 11E/11W power trail runs!



Since there were 5 of us going and we did not want to spend a lot of time writing out our names on the log, we knew that a team name would be needed.  And we all know there is only one possible name for this many super cool people....
and thus Team Awesomesauce was born!

You may be wondering what ingredients make up such an awesome team? Well, I am glad you asked...here is the recipe:

 

 

 

Have you ever been around someone who is so insane that they tend to bring out the mental in you too?  Well imagine having stuffed 5 of that person in one Geo-Van of Destiny and that was what the drive up was like.  (And I would just like to add here that I never even knew there were that many Steely Dan jokes possible!! They will know what I am talking about!) 

 

 It was an almost non-stop laugh fest as we effortlessly zipped through the first 50 caches. Then we began to notice something did not feel right with the brakes.  Then came the odd smell, followed by the loud grinding. 

 

You guessed it!  All of the stop and go action had taken its toll on the brakes and the Geo-Van was groaning in protest. 

 

At this point, we pulled over to enjoy a frosty treat from the local Dairy Queen (and grab a cache in the parking lot, of course!) while we phoned for help from a nearby garage. 

 

YUM!!!!!

 

Finding a garage that was open and able to take in a last minute repair on a Saturday was a miracle, but when you have this much awesomesauce in one place, miracles are bound to happen!  To sum it up, Two hours at a Shoney's, Two break pads, Two rotors and Two nearby caches (picking up on a theme here?) later and we were back on our way to conquering the power trail!

 

 Big shout out to FreeService Auto Center for doing such a great job of getting us in and back out on our way!! 

Once we were back out on the road, there was simply no stopping Team Awesomesauce...we were like a mad geocaching machine on a mission! 

The majority of our finds were just park and grab pill bottles hidden at guard rails and traffic signs, although we did throw in several really breathtaking and interesting Earth Caches and Virtual Caches- I will write about these in a separate post just to save some space on this one.  So most of our trip looked a lot like this... 

Luckily for me, only one dash ended up with me trying to scramble out of a muddy ditch full of banana peels! I escaped with only a few scratches to my leg and quite a bit of bruising to my calf and my pride!  Sometimes the gods of geocaching simply demand a blood sacrifice!! haha!







We came upon many interesting places with random unexpected sites
thrown in, such as disturbing self-dressing hot dog giving off a seductive lip lick inviting you to have a juicy bite of his wiener; or cows whose colors I am pretty sure you do not find naturally occurring on most farms.


All in all, even with the time taken out for vehicle repairs and bathroom/food stops, combined with several DNFs,  we were able to capture almost 400 smileys in just one fun filled, wacky weekend!! 


Team Awesomesauce definitely lived up to their names and I am looking forward to our next incredible adventure together!!

Team Awesomesauce enjoying a much deserved celebration dinner!!!

(Stay tuned for more posts with photos from our crazy outing in TN too!)