Dear brseeker,
I wanted to apologize to you and your family for holding onto your trackable for so long. I wanted to let you know that I acquired it by accident. I had taken my very young son and nieces out for a day of geocaching in the spring of 2018, and we visited the Saxon Cemetery; part of the Whatcom Spirit Quest, where we found a cache. A short time after that my sister in-law came to visit from out of town, and my son was telling her about geocaching, and he wanted to show her where he had found one once. The cemetery is very close to our home, so he took his Aunt for a bike ride to show her. When he opened the cache he found your trackable, and rather than leave it he brought it home and gave it to me to log and send on it journey back to Grandpa. Unfortunately, within a few short days of receiving it I was hit with the news that my mom had stage 4 cancer. I spent 2 years traveling back and forth to Wyoming to spend as much time with her as I could, and then another 4 months staying in Wyoming taking care of her because she chose to do her hospice care at home. Then, just two weeks before she passed I received a call telling me that my dad had died. 😭 The following morning I was on the phone with an attorney filing for guardianship of my 40 year old handicap sister and, a funeral home in Oregon making arrangements for my dad’s viewing (that I didn’t get to attend) and his cremation. A week after my mom passed I was traveling to Oregon to bring my sister home to live with me in Washington. As soon as we we home the pandemic hit. I was finally able to get some help with caring for my sister in January of 2022 (she requires 24 hour care).
I don’t see that I logged receiving it or that I dropped it off near Hovander park last June. I have been checking my logs to see if he ever made it back to Penticton but I never did see it in there and I didn’t know where else to look. I just figured out how to search it by number today (fortunately I took pictures of the tag when I placed him back in June) and I’m so happy to see that he made it home. Unfortunately, it looks like your grandpa may not have got to see that the trackable made it back home, and for that I am sorry. I also apologize for this long story. I just wanted you to know that I never meant to keep him, and let you know the reason it was held up for so long.