One of my favorite memories has to be the first year he came to our “August Party”. Kay (Don’s wife) and R (my other half) took Don’s Jeep up to my brother’s cabin and left it there. They then came back down to the party and handed CYLUmp a sheet of paper that had five sets of coordinates on it. They proceeded to tell him that his Jeep was at one of the sets of coordinates, but they wouldn’t tell him which set. I’ll be darned in that man didn’t walk to each and every set of those coordinates to find his Jeep. We all got a good chuckle out of that one.
I’ll forever miss hearing my phone ring, looking down and seeing his name on the caller ID. I’d answer “Hi Ump” and he would reply “Scaryann, I’m at (insert cache name here) and I can’t find the dang blamed thing.”
Ump loved caching. Even when he was fighting cancer and you know it was a rough day for him he was still out there looking for that cache. He was first to find on our “Evil R” cache. I’ll never forget that day. We were on our way home from somewhere, I don’t remember where, when my phone rang. It was Ump. “Scaryann, I’m at your dang blame cache and I’m stuck.” I assured him we would be there within ten minutes to give him a rough time and maybe a hint or two. Instead of heading home we changed our course to head up to that cache. Sure enough there he was, right where we expected someone to be stuck on that cache. After chuckling for a second or two, or maybe three, we got out of our Jeep and walked up to him. “Hey Ump, what’s up?” We watched him and chatted for a few minutes. You knew by looking at him that he was having a bad day, but he still had a smile on his face. We finally took pity on him and told him that he was a few feet off. After a few minutes of watching him search yet another spot that didn’t hold the hide, I took pity on him. (He was looking pasty by then) We gave him an even better hint. I held out a camera, nail clippers, utility knife, and an inspection mirror and told him that one of the items would help him in his search. He happened to grab the correct item and then started looking for someplace to use it. When he finally found it the look on his face was priceless. He had so many threats for us that day. It was great. We told him that he would have to put all his threats into his online log. The cache is archived now, but you can still read his log.
If you have memories of CYLUmp (Don) please tell them.
This cache is pretty straight forward. No puzzles (Ump hated them) no long hike in the woods (Ump enjoyed these, but I am having more and more problems with walking every day). It's close to being a park and grab, but better.