Got back from a weekend at Hilton Head and Hunting Island, SC. Completed our biggest cache hunt to date,
Survivor: Hunting Island. We went to Hilton Head on Friday. Christy was nice enough to let us stay at one of her parents' 3 condos on the oceanfront. It was way too cold to fully enjoy the beach but the accomodations were nice and I enjoyed seeing ocean instead of mountain for a change. There was some "miscommunication" on friday night concerning "Muslims" and Waffle House, too long a story to relay in a blog.
On Saturday M and I set out for Hunting Island to do the cache. We arrived around 9am and did not complete the cache until about 5:40pm. It's a multicache of multicaches that covers the whole island so it took some time to find them all. We were also delayed to a certain extent by the park's oh-so-accomodating staff. One elderly volunteer accused us of "not even paying to use the park" (which we did pay, $4 per person in fact). The ranger wanted to know "who [we] are with?". He had never heard of geocaching but told us we couldn't park in the park store parking lot for more than 15 minutes, else a $425 fine could result. So we trekked a mile or so back to "public parking" and hiked back to the store near the trailhead. This time he immediately wanted to know where I had parked and we got a brief lecture basically saying if we're not campers, we're not wanted in that part of the park. Nice. Despite all this I call the Survivor Cache, the best *technical* cache to date. The terrain was not a problem, the caches themselves posed relatively little difficulty (except for the first one which took us WAY too long to find), but there were so many and the structure of the cache was just complicated enough to make it interesting and hectic. We were on the brink of total woodland darkness when we found the final cache, 20 minutes after sunset.
We arrived back to find nobody at the condo and so met them all at the resident "seafood" restaurant nearby. I thought the food was outlandishly expensive considering the quantity and quality. M picked up the tab because of my recent birthday. Thanks M! Only later would he find out how violent the sea can be. I thought I dreamed the whole incident, M furiously heaving near a waterfall but for him it was all too real. A running faucet could not hide Neptune's anger. What the Ocean giveth, the Ocean taketh away.
The remainder of the trip was lazy. We slept late today and drove back. It was a lot of fun. Glad we went.
