“When we log our find we need to tell other people to go ask for the fireman’s special,” I said.
“You should check in with your folks,” Twiggy suggested.
“What if they ask where I am?”
“Then we’ll find out where we are.”
“What if they make me come home?”
“They can’t make you.”
“I guess I didn’t exactly get their permission before I went along with this.”
“What did you do?”
“My mom said she would think about it and I excitedly told her thanks for saying yes and hung up.”
“You should at least let them know you’re all right.”
“I’ll call them tonight. I’ll have better luck with my dad than I would with my mom.”
“Gwendolyn!!!” squealed my youngest sister, Jocelyn.
“Shh, is Dad home?” I asked.
“Yeah, but you better talk fast. It’s almost dinner time.”
“Okay.”
“DAAAAD! Telephone!” she yelled as she ran through the house.
“Hello?”
“Hi Daddy!”
“Gwen, how’s my girl getting along in the big wide world?”
“Fine! I was just checking in because Twiggy thought you’d probably be worried about me by now. Everything is great, though, and I still expect to be home for Meredith’s birthday.”
“That’s great. Who is this Twiggy? I don’t think I’ve met her.”
“Oh, they live in another dorm. That’s why you didn’t see them when you helped move me in.”
There was a very heavy silence and I wondered what I had said wrong.
“Gwen, tell me the truth.”
“I am!”
“What is Twiggy majoring in?” he asked.
“Computer Science!”
“That’s great. Say, I’ve had a problem with my new laptop. Do you think Twiggy would have any idea what I can try to get it to connect to the internet?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” I said. “How can you have trouble connecting? We’ve found internet connections at every stop. We just watch for the signs!”
“Do you think you could put her on so I can ask?”
“Uh, no! I can’t! Twiggy is…”
“Gwen, is Twiggy… male?”
It was my turn to stop in stunned silence.
“Let me talk to him,” he said sternly.
Gulp. “I have to find them.” I covered the phone as I said to Twiggy, “He wants to talk to you! What do we do!”
“What’s wrong with that?” he asked.
“They think I’m with a girl friend! They never would have let me go if they knew you were a guy!”
“What should I do?”
“Be polite! He’s already guessed.”
“Okay.” He took the phone. “Hello?... Yes, sir… Yes, sir... No, sir.”
“You don’t have to lay it on that thick!” I whispered.
“When you use your laptop where are you in relation to your router?... I see. Do you have any devices that might scramble the signal?” There was a long pause while my dad, presumably, listed all the electronics and electrical appliances near his work area. “Well, a fan would do it… Move the fan to a different location and see if that helps.”
“He’s really asking you computer questions?” I asked.
“Shhh,” he said as he nodded yes. He took the phone and left the room, walking around outside as he talked to my father. I was sitting on pins and needles, wondering what my dad was going to do.
When he came back he handed me the phone.
“Daddy?”
“Gwendolyn… I don’t know what to say. Your mother said…”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Honey, think when you speak. Or, should I say, you’ve been thinking too carefully when you speak. It takes some concentration to use the word they instead of he or she. As soon as you said they I knew you were covering something up.”
“Oh. Mom didn’t seem to notice.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“No! Dad, please don’t!”
“Why?”
“Because… she’ll make me come home. And…”
“I won’t?”
“I… Dad we’re not doing anything we shouldn’t. We’re geocaching! We’re finding hidden treasures. Today we found one on an old fire truck. What’s so bad about that?”
“You told your mother you were helping a friend get home from school.”
“I am! We’re just geocaching our way there.”
“I could demand. But I don’t think demanding things of a twenty-two year old daughter is a good way to maintain a good relationship with said daughter. If I have done a lousy job of parenting then…”
“You haven’t, Dad, you’ve been a great dad. And I won’t do anything wrong. You’ll see.”
“Will I?”
“Yes! I’ll be home in time for Meredith’s birthday just like I promised.”
“Be careful while you play with fire,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just keep it in mind.”
“Okay, Dad. I’ll see you soon. I love you.”
“I love you, too, sweetheart. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I know.”
“Take care,” he said.
“I will.”
Twiggy and I stood there asking each other a hundred silent questions before he said, “If I lay a finger on his precious daughter I am dead.”
“That sounds typical. Hey, it was your idea for me to call home.”
“The good news is I think I got rid of his computer problem.”
“Oh, good.”
I held out my finger and smiled. He stuck his finger out, too, so I held my hand out palm up. He laid his finger in my hand and I curled my hand around it.
“Good, now that we have that taken care of, what do you want for dinner?”
“I feel like I need to make sure you eat right.”
“That’s silly. How about hot fudge sundaes for dinner?”
“Gabby… I don’t want to make your dad mad.”
“He’ll never know what I eat for dinner.”
“Still, he wouldn’t let you eat ice cream for dinner.”
“Ah, you don’t know my dad. We’ve had many a midnight bowl of cereal with extra sugar on top.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, in our PJs at the kitchen table crunching down cold cereal. That’s his favorite snack. Well, his favorite snack that we keep around the house. He likes Honey Nut Cheerios and I like Honey Bunches of Oats. He even lets me pick out the oatmeal clusters.”
“Wow, I wish my dad would let me pick out oatmeal clusters,” he joked.
We ate a fairly normal dinner, but I felt bad that Twiggy was ending up paying for nearly everything. I tried to keep our budgets in mind. The soup and sandwich combo in most places was more than enough food for me and was usually affordable. I wasn’t sure how many turkey club/clam chowder combos I could eat before I would start gobbling and walking sideways, though.
“At least that fire truck cache turned out to just be difficult, not dangerous,” I said.
“That’s the way we like them,” Twiggy answered.
We turned on the laptops and began searching for a new cache.
“Difficult caches are hard to find,” I said.
“That makes sense,” Twiggy answered.
“No, I mean there aren’t very many of them.”
“That’s because it’s easier to hide an easy cache than it is to hide a hard one.”
“So the rating is for the hide, not the find?”
“No. We need to put in some miles. The event is coming up quickly.”
“Okay. That means we can look at caches further away. Maybe that will help us find a hard one to look for.”
“It’s getting tougher to find caches that meet all our requirements: few muggles, high difficulty, safe, interesting, fun, rough terrain, but not too rough.”
“Maybe we should head off the main roads since our registration is going to expire any minute.”
“Okay, we can do that. The van has a pretty high clearance. It’s basically a truck frame with a box on the back.”
“Have you ever done any driving on rough back roads?” I asked.
“Hell yeah! Boondocking! Haven’t you ever been boondocking?”
“I went camping once. My family had a pop up tent trailer. We had to drive down a dirt road and go to the bathroom in an outhouse.”
“That’s not camping.”
“Of course it is!”
“Camping is sleeping on the ground and eating food cooked over a campfire and watching the stars and seeing meteors shoot across the sky. It’s fishing and hiking and getting away from it all. You can’t get away from it all in a tent trailer!”
“Then let’s do some boondocking,” I suggested.
“You really want to?”
“Sure! What do you wear to go boondocking?”
“Anything you want. But you might not want to wear your best clothes. Wear something you can get dirty in.”
It took about half an hour of searching before Twiggy began saying things like, “hmmm, maybe. Where does it go? Okay, zoom in. Sheesh it disappears under the canopy. Is there a road there? Oh, there it is. Wow, a mile as the crow flies is six by road. Cool!”
I peeked over my screen at him.
“Did you find something?” I asked.
He gave me a mischievous grin. “It’s not a power trail, but there’s caches about every quarter mile and the road winds way back in the hills. It looks like fun. The caches aren’t difficult, but it is definitely off the beaten path.”
“Will they help you win the contest, though?” I asked.
“Anything counts.”
“How far away is it?”
“Another twenty nine miles.”
“Sounds like it helps us get closer to the event, too.”
“Okay,” click, click, “Download beginning. Fifty-four caches.”
“Fifty-four? How are we going to find fifty-four caches in one day?” I asked.
“No problem,” he said. “We’ll just do it one cache at a time. There are people who have found hundreds in a day.”
“How?”
“One cache at a time.”
I couldn’t even imagine doubling my cache count in one day. I’d only found one or two caches in one day, and now we were going to try to find fifty-four? I prayed they were safer than the past caches we’d found and I hoped the boondocks were kind to us. It was like venturing into the bush in Australia to me. Boondocking. Geocaching. Fifty-four caches in one run. Yikes!