Just thought I'd drop in and say howdy to you guys. I hopefully will have enough free time from work now to actually start caching again, even though I said I'd never cache during the summer.

Ah well. That's it.

Ob Caching: We had our Team 3Q kickoff meeting at the Heritage Park Pavilion yesterday! Didn't have time, of course, to look. (Sigh).

Hope alls well with everybody!

Jason

Good to see you're getting back into 'the hunt'. I'm not crazy about cachin' in 90 degree heat either, but being from south La, I can take it (for now). Seems like the older I get, the less tolerance for heat I have. That don't mean I like it, tho. Hope to see ya on the trails.

"Give to a pig when it grunts and a child when it cries, and you'll have a fine pig and a bad child." -Proverb

Yeah, good to see you again.
I just got back from Minnesota.
A.K.A. Land of 10,000 Lakes (and 10,000,000,000,000 mosquitoes!). I seem to have a slight fever and flu-like illness, including shaking chills, headache, muscle aches, and tiredness. I sort of seem to be turning yellow too. Maybe its just a cold.

I just got back from a week in and around the Great Smokey National Park. I saw dozens of deer, two coyotes, turkey, ticks and gnats . . . but NO mosquitos. It was truly a pleasure hiking and geocaching in the area and not returning with a quart of blood missing on each outing. Sure am glad to be back home. Afraid the mosquitos in my backyard might have starved if I delayed one more day. Ha, Ha.

I don't know what's up with them awful skeeters in the north woods. You would think the severe winters would kill them off. When I lived up there you just couldn't go outside from May till October or you'd be sucked dry. Then from October to May it was 20 below zero. What a great place to live! (Not!) When I go back to visit in summer I get more skeeter bites in 15 minutes than I get in Georgia all year.

It is those 10,000 lakes. For every lake there are 100 swamps and bogs and ditches full of stagnant water. There was a micro in a park near a swamp and I looked for about 20 minutes and finally just ran away. Nobody was at that park that day... imagine that!

I spent 8 days canoeing and camping with a Boy Scout group in the Northern Tier / Boundary Waters Area four or five years ago. We were sure to be our tents when the sun went down 'cause that's when the skeeters came out. Before lights were turned out we'd use our penlights in the tents like searchlights looking for any that did sneak in before the zippers were closed. Those would be killed before we could safely go to sleep.

Using the toilet was interesting too. We'd have to put DEET on our checks or they'd be attacked as soon as we pulled our pants down.

I do recall that despite the fact that the mosquito is the Minnesota state bird their bites really didn't seem to hurt as much or cause the welts their southern cousins did. The quantity sure was high though!

~erik~

As I'm sure mtn-man can attest to, the skeeters in southern Louisiana are mean and big. In fact I've seen a couple that drive their own SUV!
Hell, they even raised 'em here in Thibodeaux.


"Give to a pig when it grunts and a child when it cries, and you'll have a fine pig and a bad child." -Proverb

[This message was edited by phat.bak on July 21, 2003 at 08:36 PM.]

When I lived in South Georgia, a friend of mine was a scout leader. He told of the time they did a summer camp out in the Okefenokee swamp. Being a south Georgia summer, they were in the tents will little or no covering. Then during the night when they rolled over in their sleep and touched the tent, the mosquitoes would nail them through the tent wall.

When I lived down there I found that mosquitoes in South Georgia, came in two sizes, the ones small enough to go through a screen door, and the ones big enough to open it.

Hmm.... I think I might have to rethink my rethunk about caching during the summer. I be scared of SUV-driving, door-opening, child-toting-away mu-skeeters. Perhaps a think two-inch-layer of deet-inpregnated aloe lotion would work. I'd smell purty, too! Heh