PO'd in Auburn??

Saturday morning we hopped out of bed at 5am with Mike kicking and screaming and were out the door by 6:30am headed to Auburn for a day of caching. Thirty minutes up the road Mike was talking to me again so I knew he was finally conscious. We found our first cache at 8:29am and by 9:04am we had found five. We were feeling pretty confident by then so we headed out Forest Hill Road to pick up four more caches. Three DNF’s later we finally found our sixth cache at 10:20. Our confidence was waning, but we headed on back to Auburn in hopes of more caches to be found.

We had a roughly circular route in mind taking us up Highway 49 and then home via Magnolia Road to 80. We worked our way back and forth on both sides of Hwy 49 and were being pretty successful. We visited the back roads of Auburn to find obscure trails to walk. We made a quick left turn into a “Do Not Enter” area, but are happy to report that no cars were coming at us so as I was squeaking, GeoJeep saved the day and headed for the right side of the road. We visited the Auburn Cemetery for the second time and ended up stopping for lunch just outside their gates.

After lunch we tried to find a new cache that no one else had been able to find. We walked up a short path, around some nasty berry bushes and started our search mucking through the trees. We came up empty as well. We widened our search thinking the coords might be off but with no luck. We went on from there and by the end of the day we had 25 caches and 8 DNFs. It was about 4pm so we headed home.

After arriving home, we discussed whether we needed to worry about poison oak (PO) and were sure that we had not seen any at any of the caches. We had our dinner and I logged our finds. After finishing logging the successes, I started to log the DNFs. As I logged the DNF on the new cache with the berry bushes and the trees, I noticed that a previous cacher said that the trees were covered with PO. Well S**T!! For two old folks, our clothes came off in record time. We slathered on the Technu, waited the required time and jumped in the shower. Luckily we have two showers so we didn’t have to fight over who went first.

Now two days later we are glad to report that we weren’t PO’d in Auburn!!