Ooops

I came very close to being monumentally stupid today. We were out geocaching, in the middle of the woods, when I found that I'd dropped my GPS somewhere. Let's pinpoint the ways in which I could have killed us all.

1. No one knew where we were. I need to leave a note for Dan before we go hiking so he'll know where we are if something goes wrong.

2. I drove down a road that was marked as "Closed Due to Flooding". My thinking was that as long as I went slow, I didn't have to worry about getting stuck. But I should have learned from the tragedy of the Kim family in Oregon. If you get lost, people won't look for you on roads that are supposed to be closed.

3. We headed out into the woods on something that wasn't really a trail, it just looked like one. I was trying to decide if something that looked like a clearing ahead of us was the actual trail when I realized that the GPS wasn't in my pocket anymore.

4. The only smart thing I'd done was mark the location of the car on the GPS before we headed into the woods. That way, if we got twisted around, we'd be able to find our way back. Realizing that I no longer had the GPS gave me a twinge of alarm at my previous stupid moves. We were not far from the car, but it was very much out of sight, and we'd followed a twisty route as we went over logs and around bushes.

I depend too much on the GPS to sort me out if I get lost. Obviously, that isn't smart. I also have to realize that I could get hurt somehow. I need to be smart and not go on some of these trails without either Dan or Janet with me. There are plenty of places that have regular hikers or ATV users, I need to stick to those and not go bushwacking into the woods.

This trail, which was where we should have been all along, was much safer. And where the kids found lots of rocks to throw.



Now for a laugh. The hike tired Claire out so well that she fell asleep in the middle of a diaper change. I was going to post a picture of her little bare butt sticking in the air, but I've decided to spare her that.