Whitewall FTW

This is a geocache for the adventurous cache seeker looking for more than a walk in the park. Much more........

Anyone who has hiked through Zealand Notch in the White Mountain National Forest of New Hampshire has crossed the talus slope at the foot of Whitewall Mountain. Perhaps you were on a day trip to Thoreau Falls or an over-night to the Zealand Falls Hut or Ethan Pond Shelter. Or maybe you were hiking through on the Appalachian Trail. Did you look up the 600' Whitewall Cliff and wonder what's up there. Well, until recently there was nothing on top but spectacular views in nearly all directions. Now there is also a geocache.

Whitewall Mountain is only 3,405 feet, too small to attract peak-baggers and trail builders. The upper slopes are virgin territory, traveled only by moose and black bear. This will be a major bushwhack for any cache hunter willing to accept the challenge. Careful planning and excellent navigation skills are required. Simply punching the cache coordinates into your GPSR and heading out will not do. Hiking up and down the backside of the mountain took me a full 8-hour day using multiple waypoints carefully plotted in advance.

There are several possible trailheads and approaches to the cache. I won't go into the details of my route selection, since I won't say that my way is the best/safest/quickest way. Choose a route that looks best to you after studying the available maps and aerial photos and weighing your personal strengths and weaknesses. Plan ahead carefully and be ready to turn back if you find yourself over your head. Consider the possibility of an overnight bivouac and come prepared for darkness and changes in the weather . Don't even think of seeking out this cache unless you are experienced in the backcountry. Remember that New Hampshire has a reckless hiker law that can make you liable for the costs of your own rescue. Let's be careful out there. That said, I found the trip to the summit a blast and hope you will too.

This cache is often said to be the hardest cache in all of New Hampshire. Clearly, I wanted to see what the hype was all about. I didn't want to do this alone, though, and when I learned another cacher was planning a trip up here today, I made sure I was able to attend.

It's a three hour drive from Keene, so I spent the night at my mom's to cut my commute by 30 minutes. I woke up around 4:00 AM so I could get ready and be there by 7:00 AM. Instead of reiterating what I would eventually write on the Whitewall Mountain caches page, I'll post snippets of myself and the five strangers I ended up hiking with.

HockeyPuck:

Whitewall is one of those caches that everyone wants to do - ONCE. It's a worthy location, deserving of a revisit, unfortunately I can't claim a 2nd smiley but the enjoyment of hiking with old and new friends put a smile on my face greater than any virtual caching smiley could provide.

Several months ago I learned of muchado's intentions and my first impression was he's finally lost his marbles and gone off the deep end. I privately wondered if he understood the full aspect of what he was suggesting and I privately questioned his ability. I then watched muchado's aggressive training program, determination and transition to a prepared hiker on an arduous journey.

HockeyPuck bushwhacked to this cache with another group last October. It was an epic disaster, with lots of rain, wind, and snow(!) to contend with. Must have been fun.

Max Jerome:

Myself and five others started our epic journey at around 7:15 AM. The trek along the Zealand Trail and Ethan Pond Trail was pretty flat and uneventful. Eventually, we got to a point where fishandgamer and plotthound2 felt they could scale the rocks, go over a notch, and find themselves at the cache site. The rest of us went further south, and when we got to the place where rjb43nh supposedly started his bushwhack, Hockeypuck and I attempted our climb. nashuan and muchado went a little further south and east.

The route Hockeypuck and I took was pretty rough, best defined as being an utter trainwreck. It was shorter than the original rjb43nh route, but it's not a route either of us would recommend others to take. There were many points where I had to rely on wet rocks not causing me to slip and/or tree branches not snapping on me. It was wet, treacherous, and buggy. On the plus side, of the three groups of two, we made it to the top first. Yay? Found the cache, signed the log, TNLN. Hockeypuck and I then made a very wet trip to the summit, making my dry backup socks completely soggy within minutes. Woohoo!

I'm kinda bummed that I forgot my camera in the car, because there are some nice views to be had up here.

Yeah. He and I took a less round-about way than the route shown on this topographical map. And this is the elevation profile we all had to endure. Can you get where the fun started? The hike up was fun during that half a mile. No resemblance of a trail anywhere. Trees and rocks as thick as Oprah. I saw more moose crap than I've ever seen in my life. But we made it up top. First, no less!

plotthound2:

6 of us set out just after 7AM, muchado, hockeypuck, maxjerome, nushuan, fishandgamer and myself. fishandgamer and I left the other four @ N44 10.790 W071 28.782 to go straight up the rock slide. This route was OK but the drawbacks are the very loose rock (big ones) and it is very steep. The upside is that there is very little thick buswhacking, only the last .1 mile or so. When we got to within view of the top we could see hockeypuck and maxjerome already there. We assumed that our route was longer than the others'. Little did we know of the trouble muchado and nashuan were having.

plotthound2 and fishandgamer pretty much went perpendicular to the trail we took, and it was the most direct route to the cache. They had trekking poles, so they could get away with it. :) Definitely not a route you would want to take back down, though.

muchado:

The walk out to the start of the climb was great. The trails are really nice and although it was about 4 miles in, I didn't mind because I wasn't looking forward to the bushwhack and climb. The trail we used goes right through the lower part of the rockslide that makes up the "white wall" and that was awesome. Looking up at the top of Whitewall was daunting to me, but it must have looked like a fun challenge to plotthound2 and fishandgamer, because they decided to climb up the rockslide through a notch they spotted. That was way beyond my ability, so I continued on with my original plan.

Once we got to the spot where we were supposed to start our climb, Hockeypuck (HP) and MaxJerome (MJ) didn't hesitate and just started climbing. I still didn't like what I saw, so I decided to move a little farther down the trail in the hopes of finding less dense bushwhacking. Little did I know that this would soon seem like trivial bushwhacking! I didn't see anything better, so Nashuan and I started the bushwhack climb too. HP and MJ were already out of sight. The going was very steep and we kept hitting some really dense bushwhacking. We kept cheating east in the hopes of finding easier climbing or bushwhacking, but no luck. This is about an 800' steep climb that would have been a challenge on bare terrain, but it was hellish when you throw in the thick bushwhacking. By the time we were almost halfway up, HP told me over the walkie-talkie that he and MJ were already up at the top. Nashuan and I were exhausted; resting often and moving slowly.

Things just got worse as we got higher - the flora became much thicker and the slope became steeper. We cheated east and still go no break from either. About 3/4 of the way up, we hit our first cliff which was really demoralizing. But we managed to find a way around the short side. We then hit an area that was so steep, I was using tree limbs as climbing ropes and only had slippery wet rocks for footing - very dangerous and stupid, but we weren't about to turn back. We hit another wide area of demoralizing cliff and had to work harder to get past this one.

We finally got past the cliff and were only 500' from the cache, but it's the longest 500' I've ever done in geocaching. It's at this point that I compounded a mistake I made earlier. At the start of the climb, I had put on my rain jacket so that I wouldn't get soaking wet during the bushwhack. During the climb, this acted as just a big insulator and I must have sweated off quite a bit of water and dehydrated myself more than I realized. I was now feeling lightheaded and knew I should stop to eat and drink. But everyone else had already been waiting for us at the top for over an hour and I didn't want to hold them up - yes, I know, dumb, dumb, dumb. So, we pressed on through that last 500' of steep and thick and finally came out onto ledges and saw the rest of the gang lounging around.

I didn't want to make anyone wait a lot longer than they already had, so I tried eating some lunch but couldn't get much down. I drank what I thought was a lot of water. After signing the log and resting for about 15 minutes, we were up and going. The team had decided to just shoot down the ridge down the "gentle" slope since none of us wanted to try going back down the routes we had come up.

We were just barely starting our descent when I slipped, my right leg shot out, and I got one of the worse and longest lasting calf cramps I've ever had. It was so sudden and intense, I screamed like a little girl. Oh well, so much for pride. Everyone had a really worried look on their faces because they thought I had broken my ankle. I could see the thought go across their face about the implications of "Everest rules - you die where you lie" because they were not going to carry me off this mountain. After a long couple minutes, the cramp loosened up enough for me to stand, but it had really done a lot of damage to my calf and walking was really painful. To make matters worse, I could feel my leg about to cramp again on almost every step. I had to step carefully and gingerly making sure not to extend my foot which is almost impossible in the kind of bushwhacking we were doing.

About 10 minutes later, my left quad started cramping which stopped me in my tracks - I couldn't move. At this point, I started trying to hydrate even more and fishandgamer kindly gave an electrolytes mix for my remaining water. I also got some extra water from HP. Then, HP grabbed my backpack. My descent into wimpiness was now complete. The extra electrolytes and water seemed to help with the quad cramp as it only bothered me a few more times on the descent, but the calf was still threatening cramp the whole way down.

HP and fishandgamer did a great job of breaking trail and navigating down the ridge. The bushwhacking was so thick that as soon as they got 20'-30' in front of us, we'd lose sight of them and one of the many games of "marco polo" would ensue. I think it's only about a mile or so down the ridge to the trail, but it seemed like an eternity as I was really nervous that the next misstep in the very thick bushwhacking would put me in another cramp and possibly stop my progress for a good long time. Even without the cramping issue, this would have been a miserable hike. In true Whitewall fashion, the last part of the descent was the steepest and thickest complete with a swamp crossing. But, I can't describe how happy I was to see the trail through the brush.

Once on the trail, it was much easier for me to walk without risking a cramp and we covered the final 2+ miles of our journey fairly quickly and uneventfully. When we got back to the parking lot, we all sat around and enjoyed liquid refreshments of various sorts for a good long while.

muchado definitely wasn't having fun.

nashuan:

This is probably the toughest cache to get in New Hampshire - terrain wise. I am glad to have done this one with Mike and the rest of the group and simply couldn't have done it on my own. If anyone is seriously considering taking this one on, I would HIGHLY recommend that you are honest about your limitations and to go with a group. I would also recommend that you take the orange or yellow route to get in and out. They are not easy by any means - this is REAL wilderness we are talking about, but they are easier.

Sage advice. nashuan had a rough time with it, too. He tore his pants on the way up pretty much from the groin all the way past the knee. It made for great conversation with other hikers once we got back down to steady ground again.

fishandgamer:

Have had this one on my watchlist list for a little while and so when muchado posted a note that he was going to go for it and invited others, I decided it would be fun to get this cache and to meet some other cachers as well.

Not much else to add to the others who posted already except to thank them for an excellent adventure (and the beer back at the parking lot!). Way to go guys!! I've posted a couple pictures. Oh ya, I did take a nice caribiner key chain and left a $1 bill. TFTC [cache owner], where ever you are!!

Picture time?

* AMC topo map with all sorts of different routes colored on it.
* Group photo #1. From left to right: HockeyPuck, Plotthound2, Muchado (sitting), Fishandgamer and me (nashuan is on camera detail).
* The rock route plotthound2 and fishandgamer took.
* Group photo #2. From left to right: nashuan, muchado, hockeypuck, plotthound2, myself, and fishandgamer.
* A pic of Whitewall Mountain from Zeaclif Outlook, I assume.
* Another shot of Whitewall, from the flat trail somewhere.

So, who wants to go next week? :p Opposite of "loner."



A 1% common birthday is almost four times more common than any other day of the year, you idiot.

1 / 365 = about .25%. Nothing happened.
Well, it turns out I didn't do anything this long Memorial Day weekend.

I got up later than I would have like on Saturday to do any sort of far away geocaching run, and it didn't matter much to me at the time because the forecast predicted lots of stormy weather. Lo and behold, it didn't rain for shit around here, so I could have played in the woods locally if I was so inclined.

I was going to make an epic geocaching run all day Sunday, but Mr. Mitchell called me late Saturday asking me if I wanted to do some frisbee golfing. Sure, what the hell. The tupperware ain't going anywhere.

I started falling apart physically Sunday afternoon. I could tell I was coming down with something by midday Friday, and I wouldn't stop blowing my nose 48 hours later. SARS. I ended up having to NyQuil myself to sleep. Also, I noticed I somehow got a small amount of poison ivy across my left ankle, which makes absolutely no sense because when I play in the woods, I always have socks and shoes on.

To add to my physical afflictions, I got a lump forming on one of my eyelids. It's probably another chalazion. Super. Hot compresses ftw.

When I woke up today, I was pretty run down. I was in no condition to do any sort of epic tupperware runs -- or do anything, really -- so I stayed in the condo and played video games all day. Whee.

That's alright. There are plenty more weekends coming up for me to do the things I want to do.

I'm going to bed now. The last three months
This entry exists solely to bridge the time between my Virginia Trip and Memorial Day. I like to write about what I do on the barbecuing holidays, but it would just seem a little too weird to jump straight into it without first discussing what's been going on for the last two or three months. Besides, I still have posts from February on the front page.

Needless to say, quite a few things have happened:

* One of my better friends here in Keene has completely disowned me over the dumbest of things: a misunderstanding. I don't really want to get into it, but suffice to say, the problem isn't really a problem and could very easily be solved be talking with one another. However, being ignorant is the strategy of the opposing party (coward). It's not cool when I have to get all of my information second-hand or even third-hand. Once I caught a drift as to what the issue was, I wrote a letter explaining the situation as I see it and apologize for any confusion, but I'm still being ignored weeks later. What gives?

* I recently got the worst raise ever, both percent-wise and amount-wise, in my working career. Coupled with the bullet point above and the recent crackdown on overtime, I'm really not looking to continue my life in Keene. I need to do go elsewhere and prosper.

* I had an infected epidermal cyst on my left hip. I didn't even know that what I had was even a cyst; I've had it on my body for as far back as I can remember. It never did anything. I just figured it was some sort of anomaly. But it started to turn red on one half of it. I went to the doctor's and was prescribed my first pill ever: cephalexin! It didn't seen to do much, though, because as the days passed, it got redder and redder and more sensitive to the touch. Blood was pooling near the surface, and eventually it would burst one morning in a bloody and cheesy mess and I had to take a trip to the emergency room. They didn't do much there, but a few gauze-intensive weeks, I had the fucker surgically removed. My first ever surgery. Funny that I haven't been to a doctor's office in the last 12 years, but I ended up going a total of four times over a month. I took some hot pictures of the incident but I don't know what to do with them.

* I haven't been geocaching as much as I have in years past, but it's still my primary way of killing time. I usually go out once a week and bag a bunch of them. I'm not really looking for numbers this year. Instead, I'm more focused on finding every cache in New Hampshire that existed prior to me becoming a geocaching member. There are about 130 of them, and most of them are far away and/or on desolate mountain tops. I figure if I can a couple of them a week, I should be ok, especially with gas being cheaper this summer compared to the last few years. It's not a goal I can see myself completing this year, if at all (I need a kayak for some of them), but it's nice to have a purpose.

* If I'm not in the woods hunting down tupperware, I'm typically at my mom's. I visit more often now than when I didn't have my own washer and drier. Not sure how that happened. I think subconsciously I want to be more involved with my immediate family. Catch some of my nephew's baseball games and whatnot. I kinda got the urge to settle down once I turned 30, but lacking a girl and a family of my own, I'm trying to give myself worth by checking out what's happening in Hillsboro once a week.

* I sued someone and won the case. Now I gotta collect my money. Hope that doesn't turn out to be too much of a hassle.

* Me living with Brown is still going well. We drink, play 8-Ball, and play Cribbage a lot. :) The pool they have on site officially opened yesterday. We went swimming. I don't remember the last time I went swimming prior to last night.

* Brown and I started off with three pets: two rose hair tarantulas and one snapping turtle. One of the tarantulas has died (old age?) and we set the turtle free in nearby Goose Pond.

* Mr. Mitchell and I have gone disc golfing a number of times. We bought a few new discs to replace the ones we keep losing. :) I'm impressed we continue to do this; he has a wife and a newborn and works like 60 hours a week, yet still he manages to fit me in somehow. Good stuff.

There's no guarantee I'm even going to write about what I end up doing this Memorial Day weekend, but I figure I'd write this up anyway. If you want more up-to-the-minute news, you can always look me up on Facebook. Epilogue
Caches found: only 11 (one of the ride down, ten on Friday)
Golfing done: none. I've lost interest in ball golf.
Disc golfing done: 9 baskets

Money spent on tolls: $49.50 (23.25 south, 26.25 north)
Money spent on lodging: $126.04
Money spent on food: just between Otani and Greenies, I don't want to know. :)
Money spent on gas: $64.61

Total mileage: Probably 1,400 miles (600 highway x 2 + probably 200 running around everywhere)

Favorite part: 75-degree sunny weather every day. Actually doing something with someone for once.
Worst part: I don't feel I made the best use of my time.

Things I didn't expect: Planes flying over the hotel. Spending all of the money I saved on lodging dining out instead.
Things I would have done differently: I kinda need to have a predetermined schedule when I'm doing things with Elise or else we waste a lot of time doing nothing.
Things I want to do next time: I gotta get more caching and frolfing in next time. I didn't do much of either.

Place to find some of my pictures: click here
Place to find some of my videos: click here

Last year's statistics. Glad to be back.
lol.

I was out of Elise's place early this morning. She said I could rummage through her stuff looking for breakfast. She didn't have crap. Well, she had stuff, but there's no way I'm eating cereal with lactose-free soy milk. What the fuck is that shit? I also noticed during my foraging that she doesn't own any private label / generic food. That's pretty much all I buy when I go grocery shopping. She's not exactly living the high life, either. Hmm. Whatever. Anyway, I stole a couple Kellogg's breakfast bar things and booked it.

There isn't much to say about the ride back up. I only stopped to gas and to use the bathroom. It took my about 10 hours. Like last year, I only heard each song on my cd of mp3's once each. Well, almost. I was in Keene by the time the last track started playing, and the first track started playing again once I was turning into the ungated community I live in. Son of a bitch.

I started the morning with the AC on in my car. By the time I got to upper New Jersey and New York City, it was drizzling pretty good. Halfway up Connecticut, I could see the occasional snowflake falling. I didn't really see any snow until I got to Vermont -- which was still buried in the shit -- at which point I went off on a five-minute tirade about how much I fucking hate snow and how I'm dumb living in this part of the country and I hope a forest fire wipes out all of upper New England. It was great. Battleship



Sunday didn't make for a terribly exciting day. It was more of a "hanging out" day. Which is fine.

I woke up late (per usual) to the sounds of Elise watching The Holiday, which was an ok but very predictable chick flick. We had lunch afterwards, and then she took me around Norfolk Naval Base to see all sorts of destroyers, aircraft carriers (USS George H W Bush and USS Harry S Truman), and even some sort of stealth ship (M80 Stiletto). We weren't allowed on the ships -- go figure-- but it was still pretty neat. I took a bunch of pics, and you'll find most of them up on Facebook.

On base, they had a giant store that I can only describe as a mall without walls between departments. It was like your typical WalMart, but at least two or three times the size. The TV section was set up similarly to Best Buy, both in layout and having employees around to answer any of your questions. Walk another 100 feet and you'll think you're in JCPenney's makeup section. wtf?

Strangely, I couldn't find any sunscreen in this mastodon of a store. I was burning up pretty good yesterday, and today was another day in the sun. I ended up picking some up at a store near her place after we were done playing on the base.

After a stroll along the beach with one of her neighbors, we made homemade fried chicken with homemade french fries. Yum.

We didn't do much at night, seeing how she has to leave for work at 6 in the morning and I had a 10-hour drive coming my way. We watched Breach, which was an alright movie I guess, and called it a night. Loud.



Once again, I failed to get up at a respectable time. The hotel does check outs until 11 AM; I was out by 10 or 10:30. Talk about pushing it. Whatever. I wasn't really into caching, believe it or not.

I did attempt to find a few caches higher up on the oceanfront, but I ended up with the ol' goose egg. Muggles were problematic in most of the caching spots. I couldn't get anything going anywhere I tried, so I just kinda dicked around, looked for shells, and made my fingers dance in the nearby salt water like some sort of fruit.

My cousin called me around noon, and I took off to her place right next door in Norfolk. We talked for a while and spent a lot of trying to figure out how we were going to spend the rest of the day.

We eventually decided that checking out the Jamestown Settlement was the way to go. That turned out to be a lot of fun. I snapped a billion pictures and put most of them up on my Facebook page. They had all sorts of Powhatan Indian stuff, including "housing," skins, and hunting camps.

We then took a look at some of the (replica) ships the English settlers came in on: the Susan Constant and the Godspeed. The Discovery was out of order or something. They aren't particularly big ships. I don't know how the hell they carried 70 and 50 people respectively along with all of the food and animals and whatnot they needed to make the trip. The beds were ridiculously small and poorly padded, even for the captains. Hmm.

They had some sort of English fort/village as well, and we spent a lot of time messing around in the plethora of houses. A couple noteworthy moments would be some kid wanted to pet the chickens around the fort and one of the folks that work at Jamestown put on a demonstration on the musket.

When we thought we were done, it turned out they had this huge indoor museum for us to explore, chock full of trivia and videos and even a special area where you aren't allowed to take photos. I did anyway, because I'm such a fucking rebel. Actually, I didn't. I'm a pussy. Whatever.

After stopping at the two gift shops, it was back to Elise's place. The commute back sucked balls. Traffic was back up at the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel for miles. I noticed this when we were driving to Jamestown, but apparently it didn't clear up several hours later when it was time to go back home. It took forever to get through. You're not allowed to stop in the tunnel, yet I had to apply my breaks ever ten seconds. I've come to the conclusion that when I finally do move to Virginia, I'm going to make sure that my commute does not involve taking a tunnel. I'm not a big fan of hanging out in my car when it's not moving. By the looks of it, though, there are tunnels all over the Norfolk area, so I'm very likely to be fucked one way or another. Son of a bitch.

It turns out my cousin has the same drinking book that Brown and I have, and we decided to take it with us to Greenies, a local bar. We just pointed at recipes and made the bartenders make it for us, since we lacked all of the bottles necessary to make the concoctions ourselves. :) Fun times. The bar itself was alright. They had live music. And I was surprised to see smoking in the bar; it's not illegal to do so in the state of Virginia. My clothes smelled wonderful after that. But it didn't really matter, I was five or six hard drinks in anyway. Woo woo! All sorts of action



During last year's vacation, I made it a point to get up by a set time each day, gather up my shit, and then go find a specific route if caches. Today, I woke up late and still didn't have a clue as to which direction I was going to travel in. And I didn't really care that I lost a few hours of quality GPS hunting time. Hmm.

I spent the morning working my way up the oceanfront, trying to find caches along the way. It was abysmal. Because I didn't start until later, muggle activity really impeded my progress: they were doing construction up and down the entire road. I found one cache on the porch of a museum that didn't open yet and that was about it.

By lunch time, I headed down to Northwest River Park. That's quite the silly name for a park, as it's not in the northern or western part of the state. I'm thinking it used to be controlled by North Carolina, but then Virginian forces came up with a plan and decided to move the entire border another ten miles south. That still doesn't explain the "west" part, though. Hmm. But anyway, there is a decent concentration of caches there, and I found a bunch of them.

I could have stuck around and found a bunch more in the other half of the park I never visited, but I really want to get some disc golf in. Munden Point is pretty much right next door, and since I found most of the caches in that park already, I could just leave the GPS in the car and hurl some discs at baskets. There were a surprising number of disc golfers here on a Friday afternoon, and I ended up having to start on the back nine to guarantee I wouldn't be impeded by anyone.

The course is very different than what I'm used to (Tully Dam). There are actually two tee off points and two baskets per "hole." The shorter baskets appeared ridiculously easy, so I (clearly) played from the further tee to the further basket. I did alright, I guess. At Tully, you don't really have a choice but to hit a tree every other basket and royally fuck up your game, but at Munden (like Barre Falls), there is a lot of open areas and fields with the occasional and easily avoidable tree. The terrain wasn't a challenge at all, but the wind was insane. Munden Point is next to the ocean.

I only played the back nine. By the time I was ready to do the front nine, I noticed a few groups of people teeing off at basket #2 or #3 or whatnot, and instead of being slowed down by them, I decided to head back to the hotel and get myself ready for a night out on the town.

Elise wanted to check out this hibachi place called Otani for dinner. Figuring I had another $100 I could spend courtesy of not having to spend two nights at the hotel, I figured what the hell. I've never been to such a place before. The chef makes all of the food right in front of you and puts on a fancy show at the same time. There were lots of fire, fancy tricks with spatulas, and the flipping of food into people's mouths. It was nifty. I took a video of the chef making a flaming onion. Woohoo.

When that was all said and done with, I pretty much called it a night. I wanted to do a better job at waking up early tomorrow. That wasn't going to be an easy task, because tonight (and last night), planes keep flying over the hotel. There's a nearby air base and I guess a bunch of pilots have been getting some training runs in or something. They are loud as hell, and didn't stop either night until about 10 PM or so. The ride down to VA



I made it in one piece to VA Beach, though the seagulls tried to impede my progress.

I stopped on along the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel (there was a cache at a vista there) and when I opened my trunk, I think all of the seagulls thought they saw the biggest reddest clam ever. About 30 of them flew over and were getting way too close to me. One of them tried to shake me down, but I kicked him in the face.

Ok, maybe I just ran into my car, told them to go away and almost drove over a few of them. Same difference.

But yeah, I'm here. In my hotel. Got there at 6:15ish. That makes it a 10 3/4 hour drive. I'm here for two nights and staying at my cousin Elise's the other two nights. She recently moved to a place in the next town over, which I guess means all of my future visits, I will be bunking up for free. :D

Gonna see Elise tomorrow. We're gonna check out some Japanese steakhouse for dinner. Yum?

She must be lonely as hell. Her and her husband are in the Navy... Her husband got deployed and she's kinda just twiddling her thumbs. When she talked to me last night, her mouth was running a mile a minute and she was already coming up with things we can do if/when I come down next year. wtf? I don't think she realizes that I already made all of my plans for this current trip, and I don't have to spend every minute with her. I just kinda called her out of the blue expecting she'd be busy but may want to get some drinks at some point, not rewrite my whole itinerary for me. Whatever. She's cool, though, so I don't mind scrapping some of my plans to spend time with her. There's a bunch of colonial crap around here from the Revolutionary War and Civil War that she wants to see worth looking at.