Welcome to the Jungle

Yesterday, June 1, was my birthday and I learned a couple of very valuable lessons. It’s a long post, so grab a coffee or soda and enjoy the story. I’m sure you’ll laugh about it when you read on.

Craig and I both took off work for my birthday. I decided that all I wanted to do yesterday was hang out and go geocaching. That morning, we started our research on where we would go, but knowing that Craig likes the tricky, multi-location caches, there wasn’t too much around that would suffice.

Then, I remembered a location that I’ve wanted to try and it had two good multi caches to boot. Trouble is, neither one of us had ever been in that area nor were we really prepared for what we were getting into.

The location: Hwy. 360 & Trinity (in the very wooded area on the east side of 360)

Upon arrival, we noticed some no trespassing signs around the train station were we parked. So we drove around a bit before we decided that was the best and most secure place for my car. Plus, it was a great way into the wooded area after you went under the bridge for the train tracks. Now I know you’re thinking; we were caught trespassing. Nope, we were never spotted.

Craig and I make our way into the jungle. We start on a dirt bike/four-wheeler path that’s clear. No bushwhacking necessary. But when we see on our gps that we’re even with the location, but still 350 feet away, we think it’s a good time to turn into the jungle. We thought we would come across a path of some sort, but wasn’t too concerned when we didn’t. I mean, that’s half the fun, creating your own path.

The jungle is very thick with lots of prickly briars, knee-high weeds, and dead trees that have fallen (I wonder if they made a sound?!?) Anyway, as we traverse this section of the jungle, we come across a big tree that has fallen, but not quite made it to the ground all the way. Craig takes two steps to get over it and opens up a huge ant colony. He isn’t able to see this since he has already crossed the downed log and is continuing on about 5 feet in front of me. So I go a few paces down to cross the log, whew, I made it. But then, I feel a bug bite on my forehead. “Ouch, I’ve been bitten” I say. Craig swats something off his neck, too. Then the swarm hits.

Craig and I are attacked by a swarm of bees. Craig yells at me to run, but you have to remember, we’re in a jungle… lots of trees, briars, and tall weeds, oh my! I didn’t really have a great place to run. I’m screaming and Craig’s calling out to me to go where he is, all while bees are flying around us. It felt like it took me forever to reach Craig, but adrenalin kicks in and you just do what you have to in order to survive.

I finally reach him and we’re swatting the air, jumping around, and screaming. If there had been a camera, we would win America’s funniest home videos, hands down. I’m sure we looked even more ridiculous when Craig thought like MacGyver and sprayed us down with sunscreen. See, we didn’t think about bug spray, but happened to bring a can of continuous spray sunscreen. It worked like a charm, except for the bee that was stuck in my hair.

Craig thinks I’m delirious at this point. From his perspective, he can see that the swarm of 40 to 50 bees is gone, but he can’t hear the one that’s buzzing in my hair. I’m still acting crazy when he finally realizes that ones stuck. He takes off his hat and whacks me up side the head with it. Gentlemanly, huh? After about 30 seconds of many licks to the head, we can’t seem to get the bee out. Finally, I pull myself together and whack my own head with my hand about 5 times. Craig is in shock that I’ve done this, but I killed the bee!

We get out of that area, picking bee parts out of my hair and move along to a more open trail about 50 yards to our east. If only we’d known that trail was there. Arg! But the fun doesn’t stop here. Craig lost his Oakley sunglasses in the battle of the bees. So we backtracked to the lions den to see if we could find them. Bug spray, I mean sunscreen in hand; we cautiously search for the glasses. Luckily we found them after searching for a few minutes, but we high tailed it out of there.

All of this adventure and we haven’t even found a geocache yet. We regroup, and decide to leave that geocache behind and move on to the next one. We found it without having to bushwhack or fight bees. After this one, we started the trek to the next one, but decided we were still too freaked out and should go home.

We walk on the path back to the car, the path we should have been on the whole time, and make it back without any other encounters of the jungle kind.

Lessons learned:
1. Do not geocache in the jungle or other remote locations this time of year.
2. Craig and I are not allergic to bees.

We had a really good laugh about the day’s adventures over a nice sushi dinner. Craig kept saying it was my “BEE-Day.” I guess the bee’s got that memo and wanted to wish me a special birthday wish. Nice.

Total bee stings:
Craig – 3
Kaylan – 2 small stings and 1 very large

All I can say, is I’m another year older and another year wiser.

To all of you that made it through our story, I hope you enjoy a laugh at our expense, and I hope you have a happy BEE-day, when ever yours might BEE.


Us in the jungle, post-bee stings.