Very Sad

Had such a good time around Fort Kearny last week (see below) and now I read that almost every place I went has burned in a wildfire yesterday!

North end of the fire was Coal Chute road, which I drove on, and watched some cranes. South end was Kilgore Road, which I drove on. East end of the fire was Bassway Strip WMA, where I hiked and geocached for six miles....

VERY SAD!!

Worst of all, the old bridge over the north channel here was destroyed. Click here for pics.

At least no one was hurt, and it sounds like Mel's property was unharmed.

Fueling up (Not the car!)

While on my Kearney trip, I ate at Culver's, have you seen this place?

I had a "Butter Burger" with bacon, and a chocolate custard sundae with hot fudge and oreos!

I will definitely be going back!!

Caching and Cranes

Got up at SIX A.M. Tuesday, so I could watch the sun come up at Fort Kearny. (Any teachers reading this?) I was hoping to see lots of cranes during their annual migration. Unfortunately, it appears the birds didn't want to spend the night here, I saw very few. Very few people, too, but was pretty cold at this hour.

But, thanks to Geocaching, I was driving by a cornfield North of Kearney, and guess what I saw!



Spent the whole day geocaching, walked about 15 miles, and planned my day so that I would end up south of Gibbon to watch the cranes again at sundown. This time was different, I saw hundreds of the birds, and had a crowd with me to watch. They have built some viewing platforms here, and the parking lot was packed! There was even a tour bus!



Look at this guy's camera! Anyone want to get me one of these for my birthday?


Here's the best my camera could come up with:


But that wasn't the end of the day! There's a geocache in the Bassway Strip WMA that has to be done at night! You have to shine your flashlight around and look for reflectors stuck to trees. I found TWELVE of the darn things, took me about two hours, and STILL didn't find the cache! Arrrgghh..... Still, I had fun, and it was quite a learning experience for me.

"Had" to do my geocaching logs when I got home, got to bed by 2 a.m.!

I can see for miles and miles

Another fun aspect of Geocaching is leaving "Trackable" items in a geocache. They have unique ID numbers on them, so you can watch them on the Internet as they move around, and never have to leave home! (Kind of the opposite of geocaching, but still....)

I dropped a very pretty coin in a cache in the Hastings College parking lot, way back in 2006. It criss-crossed the state, then the country a few times, before taking a big jump from Southern California all the way to Germany!

Wish now I had taken a good picture of it!

So, now I keep getting e-mails like this:
In den Händen von Wolf 6572 gesehen.
Mit den Meilen auf dem Tacho, sieht das Ding noch richtig gut aus.
Gute Reise !

The coin has now traveled 12,220.5 miles!!

Geocaching's website even makes a nice map of the coin's travels. I clicked on stop #8, and see that is in Virginia, about 3 miles from where I lived when I was in the Navy! Cool!!

Storm Hockey!

Tonight was "Camp Comeca Night" at Storm Hockey, so I figured this would be a good chance to take in a game, my first ever!

Was hoping to do some geocaching, too, but it was WAY too cold to do much.

Had a good time at the game, then had a "BBQ Combo Plate" at Skeeter Barnes! mmm....



Wow, I really like hockey!

Any Netflix users out there?

If you're on Netflix, click this link and we can do...something? Not sure how it works! Click this and let's find out!

Be my friend!

We're going north to.....Merna!

Couldn't let the beautiful day Tuesday go by without some Geocaching! Started out at St. John's cemetary east of Cozad, and went clear up past Merna!

Found 10 caches, and walked four miles around Broken Bow.

Also DNF'd (Did Not Find) a cache in Callaway, and another near the One Box Pheasant Hunt monument in Broken Bow.

Drove 160 miles!!!!