Motocaching the Counties Finale - Part 5

"No Trespassing" cache

After breakfast at the motel we began our final day in New Mexico with only three counties left to complete my mission. As we headed north on I-25 our first stop in Valencia County was near the little town of Belen but we were unsuccessful.  We proceeded north to Las Lunas where Yancey found one called “No Trespassing”.  There was another one nearby with a 5 difficulty rating so we thought we’d try it.  As it turns out it was a fairly easy find and probably should have been rated a 2 at most.

Now on to Bernalillo County in the Albuquerque area.  I had chosen caches on the west side of town to avoid the heart of the city.  Our first stop was a DNF but there was another one nearby.  We found it and it had a clever container so I thought I’d take a picture of it.  I always carry my iPhone in a zipped inside pocket of my jacket.  I walked back to my bike where I had left my jacket only to find the pocked unzipped and no camera.

Near iPhone search location

Now Yancey is a former Apple employee and like all my kids, a lot savvier than I am.  He asked if I had the “Find Your Phone” app and I said I did.  “What’s your user name and password?”  “Uhh – I have it at home”.  Not only that, but my phone was on “Airplane Mode” to keep from running down the battery while I was traveling.  So I thought I must have taken my phone out to take a picture of that 5 rated cache and dropped the phone back there.  Yancey is usually a little slower taking off so I took off like a bat out of hell backtracking to that cache 15 miles or so back with him to follow.  I walked out in the desert following our tracks but no phone.  Yancey still hadn’t shown up so I headed over to the other cache which wasn’t far away.  No luck there either.  I went back to the first one just as Yancey was showing up.  After telling him what I’d done we went to a nearby Starbucks to think things over and get out of the sun.  Then I called Kathy on Yancey’s phone to see if she could look up my password.  She said it really gave her a scare getting a call from him figuring he was going to report I’d been killed.  About that time I did finally remember my password after several unsuccessful tries.  Then as we were standing there Yancey said, “What’s that sticking out of your chaps pocket?”  Apparently when we had gone out to that 5 cache and didn’t think it was picture worthy I had just stuck the phone in my chaps pocket as my jacket was back on the bike.  Just another little Mickey Warnock adventure.

Since we had wasted about an hour in this little exercise we didn’t bother to try for any more caches in Bernalillo County.  So we headed up to the town of Bernalillo which is actually in Sandoval County.  We found that cache called “Work Horse” which was an antique tractor like machine.  This find officially completed my 9 year task and on my dad’s birthday.

Mission accomplished

Really small log book

We proceeded north and stopped at a Travel Bug Hotel cache in the desert but no Travel Bugs.  There was another one up the road called “Old Hwy 44 Rest Stop”.  It sounded like a good place to maybe get some shade and lunch.  As it turned out “old” meant it was no longer there.  It was a rough dirt road leading up to it so I left Yancey on the shoulder and rode up to eventually find it.  This was another hot day but not nearly as bad as the two previous ones.  In fact, the last couple of days it had been so hot that Yancey's phone which he uses to navigate to the caches wouldn't work. We stopped in Cuba for gas and found a nice shady place with a picnic table where we had a relaxed lunch.  I even stretched out on the picnic table bench for a little rest.

We continued northwest and back into Colorado picking up three more caches along the way just for the heck of it.  Our motel was just a few miles south of Cortez.  After lubing my chain and resting a bit we went back in to Cortez for dinner.  We swapped bikes so I could try Yancey’s new one.  It is a nice machine.  I had almost bought that model a few years back.  We had covered 386 miles this day with 9 finds and 2 DNF’s.  [To be continued] M/W