Today was a very relaxing day of swimming and boating and napping and eating.  Before heading out to the lake, I took Rich and all the kids on a geocache trek.  We looked and looked, but unfortunately, this was a DNF (did not find) for us.  Bummer.  After we got back from the lake, Rich and I went searching for a couple other geocaches.  I couldn’t let him have his only geocache experience be a DNF.  We quickly found a micro and a regular sized cache.  I spotted the first one and Rich found the second.  I think he likes the idea and may continue when he gets back home. 

After the deputies left, I jokingly said to Toby that we should just head out to Shaver right then.  She gave me one of her withering, sleep deprived looks which told me that I wasn’t being as funny as I thought.

We got back into bed, but due to the adrenaline dump, I lay awake for about an hour.  Even then my sleep was fitful.  I heard Toby get up and then she was talking to me.  “Alright, let’s go.”  It was 3:30a.  That sounded good to me.

We loaded up the rest of the stuff and the kids into the van and were on the road before 5a.  The kids saw their first sunrise during our otherwise uneventful 6 hour drive.  Toby elected to stay at the cabin and take a nap, while Max and Lucy and I went to the beach camp to meet the others.

We had a great time with Yaya, Poppa, Katie, Rich, Abbie, Alex, Jan, Jeff, Emily and Nate.  Max and Lucy and most of the other kids went tubing behind the boat.  Lucy is quite the fearless one (in some things) and she quickly used the hand motion for Uncle Jeff to speed up.

All the cousins had a great time playing on shore and in the water with each other.

We have a plan to head for Shaver Lake for a long weekend.  We packed up the van tonight after the VBS show and plannned to get an early start at 6:30a on Saturday morning.  We were well on schedule when Toby and I went to bed ato 10:30p.  As usual I fell right to sleep.

BOOM! BOOM! “Sheriff’s Department!”.

What a crazy dream.  I must have kicked Toby in my sleep because she was rolling out of bed, gasping.  Maybe not a dream.  Toby was saying something about a fire.

BOOM! BOOM! “Sheriff’s Department!”.

I was fully awake now.  It was 1:30a.  I went downstairs to see what was going on.  Through a stairwell window, I saw a Deputy at the back (alley side) office door.  I barely registered the fact that the back door was wide open.  How did he get that door open?

It turns out he didn’t get the door open.  That was why he was on site.  They were on patrol, driving thru the back alley and noticed that our van had almost all of its doors opened.  When they stopped to investigate, they saw that our back door was wide open too.  They were making sure that the van and house had not been broken into.

After checking things out, I thanked them for doing a good job, and did what should have been done 4 hours earlier : locked things up. 

by Max Theule

Up until now, we have been mostly urban geocachers. Today we tried a more rugged set of caches. We headed out to the Romero Canyon Trail.

We found 2 of the 4 caches that we looked for, but we had a lot of fun hiking about 3/4 of a mile up the trail (Lucy’s little legs were pumping away). We also had a close encounter with Nature.

Max enjoys taking pictures with the camera phone.