Unplanned Early Start

I woke up at 5:00 am this morning and despite my best efforts, I couldn't get back to sleep. Since that was not going to happen, I reached over and grabbed my ipod to check twitter - more out of idle curiosity than anything else. While it was no surprise to see Bill and a few friends in Europe actively tweeting, what surprised me was how many Vancouverites were already active - including some who are notorious for craving their morning sleep. I'm talking about you, gwilli - what the heck were you doing tweeting at 5:30 am this morning?

Anyhow, since I wasn't going to be sleeping I figured I might as well get up and go for a bike ride. I'm so glad that I did because I didn't realize quite how much I was missing it. The temperatures had not yet warmed up so I made sure to put on a long sleeved shirt under my cycling jersey but I took a chance on not wearing more than shorts. It was chilly at first, but I soon warmed up.

Since I had a little extra time on my hands, I figured I could complete one task that has been left open since my trip to New Brunswick to visit my brother. During that visit we had gone to see the Hopewell Rocks and my brother took a little time to discover a geocache while we were there. This was all new to me and he had to explain what a geocache is, and what it's about. Here comes my shortened, bastardized version of that explanation: people hide crap in the woods and expect other people to come find it. Most use expensive satellite receptors in order to find this stuff. Some even think it's fun. They even have their own lingo, which somehow makes it worse although I'm not yet sure why that is.

The net result of all this was that Shawn discovered a 'travel bug' in said geocache and figured it might be fun if he gave it to me so I could place it in a different cache, located back here in Vancouver. A travel-bug is basically a token that you are invited to steal so that you can hide it somewhere else. It usually has a serial number on it, so that you can record where you hid it on the geocaching website. Some, like this one, are quite nice and not crap at all. However let's be honest - most of the stuff you will find in these random tupperware containers is going to be crap.

So I've been carrying this travel bug as a guest in my wallet ever since that day trip in New Brunswick. It came with me to Las Vegas - at one point we thought about stashing it somewhere along the strip in Sin City, but well, that didn't happen. It seems that while things that happen in Vegas stay in Vegas, things brought into Vegas tend to leave shortly thereafter despite all best efforts to the contrary. So while this travel bug spent some time at the slot machines, it was but a brief stop before ending up (for now) at Stanley Park.

I haven't linked directly to the geocache in question mostly because it is supposed to be a bit of a treasure hunt and I didn't want to make it too easy to find. There are enough clues here though that for those who are into this sort of thing, they could find this travel bug easily enough. Of course, once my brother updates the website, the official geocachers will have all the info they need. (that should happen later today, btw.)

Near the end of my morning ride I happened to notice the new location for this year's Celebration of Light barge. It's a little further out this year which means the best locations will be different again.

Oh yeah. here's a fun fact: on Friday (tomorrow) it will be 40 days until my 40th birthday. I've been thinking about this a little bit lately and am still not sure what I would like to do to mark the occasion. Maybe that's why I couldn't sleep.