Snake Bit

06/09/2010 By Kabutroid
Ahh... at long last, I've finally had a chance to tackle this cache. I actually had a pseudo-opportunity on Sept. 20th last year... at that time, I was headed up to Red Rose to visit my Grandma's old place, and passed through Inwood. However, due to time constraints or some other reason, I left the cache, intending to go after it the next time I was by.

Which brings us to nearly a year later... today. For very similar reasons as last year, I was heading up to Red Rose once again for a quick day trip. Coincidentally this time I was planning on placing a cache at my Grandma's old, old house (unfortunately, things came up and I wasn't able to place it). In either case, having left earlier this year than I had last year, I had ample time to stop to check out the statue. Gotta say, I was completely unaware that they had names. Although I'm a bit curious which one is Sam and which one is Sara. I could have sworn that one of the genders (female, I think) is significantly larger than the male garder snake, but I could be mistaken. That, or they're both young, and thus about the same size ToungeOut . But that aside, after taking in the view of the statue in general, I began my hunt.

Thankfully, the area was all but deserted. When we first drove up, there was a van full of a family that had just finished checking out the statue. They coincidentally left just as we pulled up, so the area was dead empty from that point on. Heck, I don't even recall seeing any vehicles go by on that street in general. Course, I was behind the statue for a fair amount of the time, so who knows. My wife took a few pictures, but otherwise opted to stay generally close to the car. She's not particularly fond of snakes to begin with, was less fond of them when I took her to the Narcisse Snake Pits last year, and quite likely she was worried there would be some crawling out of the cracks in here or something ToungeOut . Didn't see a single live snake here, though.

Once I determined that ground zero was indeed at said statue, I began the hunt. Gotta say... there's a loooootta places that something could be hiding. It's listed as a 'small' size though, so I figured it couldn't be crammed into ridiculously tiny places at least. And given the sign by the car saying not to ride the snakes, I made the safe assumption that no climbing was required. Indeed I was correct in this assumption. Several minutes after working my way from one side of the statue, around the back, and off towards the other side, I eventually laid my eyes upon the cache container BigSmile . Opening it up, I signed up the logbook and replaced the cache as found. Perhaps ever so slightly better hidden, but for all intents and purposes the same. Mission accomplished . I was a tad worried that I might not be able to find the cache. I'm the type that doesn't like to leave DNF's unresolved (although a benchmark DNF in the USA will quite likely remain that way), and it would be quite a while I'm sure before I happened to come out this way again. It seems to be once or twice a year, anyway.

With the mission accomplished, I took an extra few minutes to actually look at the detail of the statue. At the start, I was more geared up to look for the cache as opposed to actually look at the statue. Really nicely detailed, I gotta say. Although, I DO still kinda wish I was able to ride them and get a pic of me on top ToungeOut .

Took: Nothing
Left: Logbook entry and chainmail ball