Thursday 7 February 2013

ET Highway Day 2: Roadrunners, Jack Rabbits, Coyotes and Head Injuries OH MY!!!

We awoke the next day not feeling refreshed at all.  Travelling takes a lot out of you sometimes, and with all my previous lack of sleep I was already a wreak.  We quickly dressed and met the team in the parking lot and headed over to the Sinclair Station for a quick breakfast and lunch supply run.  We were back on the road by 6:45am blasting down the highway to where we ended the day at 0625-ET.  Sunrise in the desert is a beautiful sight, and I am glad I got to see it.
It didn't take us long to blast past Rachel and arrive where we needed to start today.  The goal in mind was to at least reach 800 cache finds, and this meant go now, go hard, and don't stop.

We pushed on just giving it all we had, runners ran faster, navigators were trying to be more accurate at distance count down.  And because of this we had our first... OK second injury (on day one Just Leafy smashed her knee at the very first cache we did), where when Paulboy jumped out of the vehicle he smashed his head on the holy crap handle on the ceiling and knocked himself unconscious.  Just Leafy being our team medic got Paulboy back up and moving very quickly, but he refused to quit running... And so continue running he did!

We sadly at one point had to waste 40min to drive all the way to Tonopah to fuel up.  This doubled up meant that when we got back we would have to no matter what put an extra hour in after sundown to meet our goal.  And once we had the van fueled up, we rushed back to the spot we stopped at and really got back to work.

We cached on and on, seeing new and wondrous vistas.  And we saw so many neat wildlife like Roadrunners, Jack Rabbits, Coyotes and more.  There was even at one point a leg trap set for the coyotes almost right beside a cache.  We used a stick to spring that one, as it would be too dangerous for a unwary cacher who had their eyes on the prize. And we passed the half way mark by doing 1000-E.T.

Soon the light started to fade away, and once again the temperature started to drop.  This night turned out to be the the coldest yet, but we could not stop.  The van's heaters on full we pushed and pushed until we hit 800, but why stop there right!?  We did an extra 41 more (total daily count 848) before we were all just too tired and too cold, and with that slid the van door shut for the night and drove on to Tonopah where we stayed at the Clown Motel (do not go here if you have Coulrophobia, a fear of clowns).
Here we learned that it was supposed to snow that night, which did cause some hearts to sink.
After a quick dinner and clean up we turned in to sleep once more, wondering what tomorrow would bring.



No comments:

Post a Comment