Well, with the State Fair now in full swing, you can see the end of summer coming. Days getting shorter and weather getting cooler (okay not just yet, but soon) and the weeds will soon be dying down. Great time to be caching. Check out the “Hike N Seek” event next month in Marshalltown. It will be lots of fun.

Watch the next newsletter and the website for information on the upcoming Travel Bug Race. It will kick off the day of the “Hike N Seek” event and run through the end of the year.

Still looking for a new editor for this fun little newsletter. If you have an hour or so to give every two weeks, send me an email. Finally, we are out of profiles and stories and highlights and all other kinds of content for the newsletter. Yes, if you have not been profiled yet, send one in so others can know just a little bit more about you. I am calling out the BOD members who have not done one (Fishpounder, Welch, Blue Grass Tom, AB-N-AP). Also, pass on that funny story or information about that new cache. Send all this to “newsletter at iowageocachers.org”.

GC.Com Username: Shadow Cachers

Number of Finds/Hides: 1378 / 25

Occupation? pre-retired

How you got your username? We ride a '99 Honde Shadow Ace & occasionally take it on a caching run. (see our log on "The Indians were here" by oldtimer1 GCA83D)

How long have you been caching and how did you get started? Started May 21st 2006. Shelly says she wanted to do this three years ago but I'm sure I didn't hear her say anything like that. She found a deal on an explorist 500, we went looking for a cache near home, Ghost Town by Always & Forever 5 (GCKH9W) found it & we were hooked!!!

Favorite cache/why? Needle in a Cache Stash by Clown Shoes (GCW0FN) Not sure why, we were just in the right frame of mind to do the work. (have fun with it!) The Insider by zachdaddy & lilwally (GCKRP2) very well done & a good challenge! 'All wrapped up' by boasark (GCVYNJ) very unexpected. Wonderfully done. We had to think way outside the box!

Also most any cache that has some 'DNF's' logged on it and we go in for the find. Any interesting cache that uses a little creativity,difficulty... or unsual placement or nice camo job.

Least Favorite/why? A cache you can see from 100' away. That takes all the fun out, we like to do a little looking.

Current caching goals? Just to keep caching as long as it is fun. Find some / hide some. Meet more cachers.

Maybe assist in developing a tweleve-step program for fellow cachers that may need help!

Why I like Geocaching: IT's FUN!!! We love to cache together! Have not been outdoors this much since we were very young.

Meeting fellow cachers on the trail or at events. The first person we met on the trail was 'drtmn'. Blue Grass Tom was our next encounter but that is a whole other story in it self. Our close group would also include 'cc8c4'. They are on the top of our phone a friend list & great caching partners. A real good bunch to cache with!!

Most of all we get to use our brains & get outdoors & use some neet electronics all at the same time. Does it get any better??!

“Summertime, and the caches are bloomin’!” Well, with apologies to George and Ira Gershwin, it is a true summertime treasure trove of pleasure in IGO country with new caches, and even more importantly, new cachers popping up all over!

First off, a quick report on the BGTSCP – the Blue Grass Tom Seed Cache Project. There are more than a dozen new caches in less than a month that have sprung directly from the “Johnny Apple-Cache – ‘7 in ’07!” cache (GC13CEM) placed on July 7, 2007, in West Lake Park in Davenport, and they cover an area of about 100 miles in diameter and are located in three states. Fun to watch! I suggest starting something similar in your neck of the woods. If you have any questions, just email me from the website page of the cache.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie “Road Trip,” but you probably have participated in something similar to it at some point in your life. You know, someone gets an idea to drive real far, which sounds good at the time, but then turns into a marathon epic adventure. Well, that’s what we did on a recent weekend – three members of Team 4WD (which stands for 4 Wheel Drive, not 4 Weird Dudes!), myself, Larry, and Joel, who will remain named thusly without their caching handles to protect the guilty.

I had meant to attend a family reunion in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, area, but missed it due to illness. Nevertheless, I decided to go the following week to visit my family in nearby Kenosha, Wisconsin, and for some reason it seemed natural to construct a loop route that had the highest exposure to bountiful amounts of geocaches for the journey. It took no more than a few words to get the other Team 4WD members to sign on, and at 7:30am one Saturday morning we set off on a 39-hour, two-state, 67 cache fitness-and-fun tour!

I won’t relate all the details (as one of the conditions for our release,,just kidding), but I wanted to share with you the nature of some of the hides we found. You might just enjoy the descriptions, or they can be inspirations for some of your own magical, challenging hides.

We set out on I-88 and made out first foray into a cache-saturated area at DeKalb, Illinois, and nearby Sycamore. The series I liked best was one dedicated to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with 4 hides all revolving around their home, the sewer system! Film cans and other similar things tied to fish line attached to a sewer grate works real well. After the last find, we were across from the now-famous (in our memories) restaurant called “Tommy-O’s.” Old-time diner atmosphere with breakfast served anytime, so we had breakfast for lunch.

While I favored the blueberry waffle ala mode with berries in the ice cream, my co-conspirators ordered omelettes. Now, when you say, “I’ll have the cheese omelette,” and the waitress says, “How would you like your eggs?” you think: a) I might be on “Punk’d,” b) Maybe I got a tick in my ear on that last cache, because it sounded like she said…. or c) they must have restarted the science fiction series “The Twilight Zone” and we just walked in on the taping of the first episode! Nope, just 100% pure, unadulterated, fun-time Americana!

So, we enter Wisconsin, get a few caches and meet up with the family for Kenosha-style pizza, and head for the hotel in Racine. Skipping over Larry’s insatiable desire for ice cream and how that led to my meeting Officer Nancy due to the high-risk right turn, we called it a day and hit the hay.

The next morning was sunny and hot. We set out and found a quite nice fake bolt in playground equipment and someone decided it was a good idea in the midst of fallen trees in lush weeds to place a couple of metal screws into the underside of a tree and then stick a magnetic key case onto that!

Along the lakeshore we got an earthcache, then nearby was “Margarita’s Anyone?” I looked behind a bush, saw an electrical outlet, backed off, then realized it was not connected to a power source. Plugged into that outlet was an old blender. Remove the top from the part that holds the liquid, and there was the log and swag! At appropriately-named Nash Park, under a row of evergreens, our “small” cache find was an old steering wheel. Remove the center piece that used to be the horn, and there were the cache contents. Kind of made me think that maybe many people in Kenosha have been cleaning out their garages of old unused items.

We fortunately only had a few did-not-finds. Probably the one we spent the most time on was an old cannon at a park in Kenosha, right on the edge of Lake Michigan. With the three of us pounding, prodding, poking, twisting, turning, and otherwise trying to get something to move on the old military implement, we had to endure the comments of passersby, like, “Hey, you guys, trying to steal that thing?” One elderly fellow simply asked what was up, and looking toward the numerous ski boats anchored just offshore, I said, “We’re getting ready to repel the invasion of the Illinoisans!” (Kenosha is on the Wisconsin-Illinois border, and Wisconsin is a favorite play-place for many Chicagoland area residents.) Suffice it to say that we all struck out. We got a reply to our email to the cache owner before we got home – he had fabricated a bolt to fit where one was missing on one of the coil springs of the cannon and then applied something to it to get it to rust! Now, I am sure we touched it…..I just read that there is an upcoming event cache at that park in a month where the sponsor brings the ice cream and the attendees all bring different toppings. Now, that’s an event that Larry can support! We pointed the CacheMobile westward and returned via Rockford and Sterling, Illinois, where we picked up some good finds, and then it was time to close it out and head home.

There’s still plenty of summer left. Learn a little about using Pocket Queries, Geocaching Swiss Army Knife and MapSource, and maybe Garmin’s NRoute, with your laptop, and you can build your own road trip, and some real memories! We find that it is “Always An Adventure!” Good caching in 2007!