Tuesday, April 27, 2004: Picked up the kids at 4pm and we went Geocaching for several hours. This is the first time I’ve ever taken them and they really enjoyed it. Our first was in a cemetary which was hidden inside a hollow tree and Emily found it within a few minutes. The kids traded in some of their own useless toys for some new & improved useless toys. The next one was in the middle of nowhere by a creek, hidden within a few trees. They traded in even more toys, then we walked down to the creek and played under the bridge for awhile. We tried one last cache but failed to find it after about 30 minutes of looking. Hung out at a park for about 30 minutes, stopped by McDonald’s for supper and dropped them back off at their mom’s. After that I hung out in Fred Meyer’s parking lot and played on the wireless internet for about an hour.

Cellular coverage SUCKS in Albany. I can’t use my cell phone anywhere indoors. And when you try and talk while you drive around Albany, the calls always drop. The motel manager told me it’s not just my cellular carrier, it’s all of them. So if I want to make a call, I have to go stand out in the parking lot. But from about yesterday evening until the afternoon today, my cell phone wouldn’t work at all. The signal looked normal but when I tried to make a call I would always get a “network busy” error. I was reduced to buying a prepaid calling card to make a few long distance calls with. I guess in Albany they’re not worried about the cellular phone system when they’ve got the modern convenience of CB radio everywhere. To top it off, my internet connection at the motel is running anywhere from 14.4 to 19.2kbps. I’m spoiled with high-speed access, this sucks.

Another weird thing I’ve noticed about Oregon is that phone booths are everywhere. You don’t see that anywhere else in the country (that I’ve noticed, anyway) but it was one of the first things I noticed when I crossed the Oregon border and stopped at a truck stop for gas. I know in Alton there’s only one phone booth. And when the movie Phone Booth came out, an article I read said there’s only 2 phone booths left in New York City. But for some reason, every single city in Oregon seems to have them everywhere you look, even in Albany. I wonder why Oregon is so stuck on keeping them around. I’m not complaining, I think it’s pretty cool.

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Monday, April 26, 2004: So last night was pretty exciting…I went to bed around 10 or 11pm at my motel. Around 2am I wake up to a car alarm going off outside. It’s the kind of car alarm that just honks the horn over and over. After about 10 honks, it stops. A few minutes later, it starts up again. I peek out the window to confirm that it’s not my own car alarm and I see that it belongs to some green SUV. It’s pretty loud and it’s probably waking up the entire motel cause I can hear people walking around upstairs. So this SUV alarm goes on and on for several minutes. I think it was about 5 minutes total. I almost thought about hitting the alarm button on my own keychain to add to the confusion but decided against that.

Then I hear random yelling outside. Apparently one guy is really pissed off about the noise and he starts beating the hell out of this SUV. I’m thinking, “Yes! Live entertainment!” and I’m trying to figure out how to open my window so I can listen to the action. Before I can get the window open, I hear guys yelling at each other, running around and I can hear punches outside my door while some lady is shreiking. (I guess cause her boyfriend/husband is getting beat up.)

I’m guessing it’s a pretty good fight because I can hear all this scuffling right outside my door but I can’t see them from my window. I don’t want to open my door since it’s right there and I still can’t get my window open to hear better. Around this time is where I start hearing gunshots. Wow, a gunfight! But then I hear a guy screaming, “ALBANY POLICE! GET ON THE GROUND!” A second later, 3 more gunshots and another, “ALBANY POLICE! GET ON THE GROUND!” This repeats about 5 times for a total of about 15 gunshots. Apparently the guy they’re yelling at actually gets away. I dig through my backpack for my police scanner only to find out that I’ve left it in the car. Damn! I finally get my window open a few inches so I can listen to things. It’s like listening to a live episode of COPS - a trailer trash-sounding woman tells the tale while a monotone cop asks really obvious, pointless questions to her.

I sit at the window for awhile and listen to her story. I can’t see either of them but I think they were a few doors away from me. I see the motel room door in front of the SUV is open which is where the pissed off guy came from, I think. The lady telling the story gives his room number and it’s pretty temping to get on my cell phone and call that room to try and arrange a drug deal or something. That would’ve added a little fun to the chaos outside. But I decide against that too. After maybe 45 minutes I get bored with the whole thing and I lay back down, leaving my window open. Then at 3pm, things get exciting again! I hear yelling by a guy again and then, “ALBANY POLICE! STAY WHERE YOU ARE!” This repeats over and over for a few seconds along with, “DON’T MOVE OR I WILL HIT YOU!” I guess he means he’s going to shoot him. I hear the guy run past my window and several officers chasing after him, probably with drawn guns. This time they manage to catch him. Right now I’m still lying in bed, listening to the cops interview motel guests. It’s 3:30am and I guess it’s kind of over. This kind of thing makes staying at a crappy motel worth it. You just can’t get this kind of live entertainment at a Best Western Hotel. I can’t wait to read the newspaper’s version of this story tomorrow.

UPDATE: I got a paper and read the story. Most of what the lady told the cop was left out of the story. It turns out that the cops shot this guy with a bean bag gun, then the guy attacked the cop and ripped off his badge and THEN he actually got away from them. I don’t know exactly what a bean bag gun is but they sure don’t sound very effective. The caught the guy when he returned to the hotel about an hour later.

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Sunday, April 25, 2004: Me and the kids go to a restaurant and have some breakfast. The kids got some birthday money from my parents so we go to Target so they can spent it on toys. Payton gets some kind of Power Rangers transformer thingie and Emily gets a giant stuffed unicorn and some Pokemon cards. We walk around the mall for awhile and then see the movie Ella Enchanted. After that we hang out at a park for about an hour, before I drop them back off at Colleen’s at 5pm. My evening is pretty boring…I do some war driving and play on the internet for awhile. Cal’s VPN server is broken so I can’t really do anything useful on the net, like check my email.

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Saturday, April 24, 2004: Woke up at 3am and started driving again. I reached Portland, Oregon at 8am. I started up Netstumbler to find a wireless connection. I parked in a Hollywood neighborhood to check my email and to see who was on AIM. I was hoping to talk to Heywood from messedup.net but he wasn’t online. He lives around Portland so I was gonna go bother him. Since my kids are gone for the day and I can’t see them until 5pm, I have all day to kill. I decide to track down my biological father who lives in a Portland homeless village called Dignity Village. I’ve only met him one other time before, when he hitchhiked down to Vegas in 2000 to meet me at Defcon. I get the address to Dignity Village from their website, put the address in my GPS program and I’m there in about 15 minutes. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love GPS?) I drive past it several times, not seeing it. A lady walking a dog waves at me so I stop and ask her where Dignity is. She says I’m there so I park and talk to her for awhile. She ends up being a resident there. I tell a few people that I’m looking for Jack and they tell me that he works at the Saturday Market on the weekends.

I drive to downtown Portland, park, get on the train and go to the Saturday Market. I spend about an hour walking through the crowds trying to spot him. They told me that he doesn’t run a booth there, he just helps set up all the booths in the market. I haven’t seen him in 4 years but I figure I’ll find him easily since he’s got dreadlocks. I finally end up spotting him so I start weaving through the crowds to try and catch up. After a few minutes, I say “Hey Jack!” He looks at me and says, “What’s up.” and starts to walk off. I try again, “Don’t you recognize me?” He doesn’t seem to. I tell him my name and that doesn’t seem to help. After about a minute I finally get him to realize who I am and he’s pretty surprised to see me. He starts taking me to all the booths and introducing me to everyone. Then he says to me, “There’s a demonstration downtown today. Let’s go beat up some cops and start some rioting!” So we do.

Well, not really. The demonstration isn’t too exciting. There are over 100 cops there standing around with the news crews and protesters. Everyone is pissed about a guy getting shot by a Portland cop. Jack stands there and points out all of the cops to me, seeming to know all of their names, interests and histories. We meet up with a few friends of his and head to a bar for awhile. The rest of the morning is spent walking around and meeting all of Jack’s acquaintances. Overall, it turns out to be a really interesting day. I say goodbye to him at about 2:30 and get on the train to find my car again.

I end up arriving in Albany at 4:00. I stop at a Fred Meyers to rip out a few phonebook pages of motels. I find the cheapest one and move my stuff into it, then I wardrive for awhile. I don’t end up seeing the kids until after 7pm and they decide to spend the night in my motel. Today is Emily’s birthday so she gets a few presents from me, including some FRS walkie talkies and the new Kim Possible movie. We don’t really do much since it’s late, just sit around the motel and watch cartoons on TV.

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Thursday, April 22, 2004 Got up around 6am or so and worked until about 10am. Then I got my stuff packed and headed for Oregon. I’m going to see the kids for a few weeks! My original plan was to leave at about 6:00am and reach Salt Lake City by the end of the night. But I got lazy with everything and I had to work for a few hours before I left. I got on the road at about 11:30am and quit driving at about 2:00am just outside of Denver. It’s actually snowing here. In April. I’m parked in a truck stop for the night…

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Friday, April 16th, 2004: Worked until 11am, then went to the dentist. After that me and Tricia went to Red Lobster for lunch with her mom. After lunch, me and Tricia printed out a few geocaches and went hunting. Our first attempt was at the Elijah P. Lovejoy monument. We searched for about 30 minutes and found nothing. A couple of guys were at the cemetary mowing the lawns and we think it may have been hidden behind where all their lawn equipment was sitting so we’ll have to go back to that one some other day. Then we went to Commons Park and wandered around a forrest looking for another one, which we found hidden under some logs. A few hours later we went to a theater in Saint Louis to watch Jersey Girl. And since the air conditioning broke down at the theater, they gave us free tickets for another show as we left! Too bad that can’t happen went I end up seeing crappy movies. Here’s a few pictures - one of my new laptop mount and one of Tricia signing the Commons Park cache logbook:

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Today I’m building a laptop mount for my car. Yesterday I bought the plans for a mount on Ebay for $2.00 which I realize is kind of stupid because how hard can it really be. But the plans helped me pick out the parts from the hardware store rather than just guessing what I would need so it was worth it. I got the whole thing done except for drilling the holes in my floor to mount it. I was going to do that but it started raining out so I decided to wait until tomorrow. Emily called me today and I ended up talking to her for about 40 minutes. I got to talk to Payton for about 5 minutes but he ended up giving the phone back to Emily since she kept telling him what to say to me.

Went to visit my brother and we ended up doing some Geocaching. We printed out 5 searches and managed to go on 3 of them. We found all 3 stashes. One was at the Piasa Bird caves where me and Tricia tried the other day. It was a little easier to find in the daylight even though it was raining. We drove up to the security booth again just to see if the cop would do anything. He came out to our car and we said we just made a wrong turn. Turns out that it’s the city’s water supply. We found another cache at the Alton Federal Prison Memorial and then one on a bike trail in Wood River. Here’s a couple pictures:

After this we went to Slackers to look at PS2 games, Applebees to eat and then Saint Claire Square to look at more PS2 games.

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Thursday, April 8th, 2004: Since Sunday I’ve had this really horrible toothache. The kind that keeps you up half the night and makes you nearly OD on asprin. So I finally got my dentist appointment today and I’m expecting them to tell me I’ve got a cavity and fix it. I haven’t been to the dentist in 2 years so that would make sense. But I don’t! The dentist says that I’ve been grinding my teeth. I say no I haven’t. She says yes you have and we get into a fist fight. Anyway, she says that people grind their teeth out of stress. I guess it’s just from missing my kids so much. Or maybe from living with Cal for 8 days straight. Or not being able to find that 2nd Geocache. I dunno, I haven’t felt stressed so I guess I’ve just got mental problems.

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Our next stop was to the Piasa Bird caves. The GPS took us around the side of the cave in the car. We were surprised to see concrete barricades staggering the road that I had to zigzag around. When I got to where the GPS stopped, I noticed a security guard booth and a policeman (a policeman, not a security guard) walked out of it and stood there looking at us. Tricia says to him, “We were, uh, just turning around.” and I leave. I have no idea what’s over there that would require that kind of security. We went back to the Piasa Bird and looked around for awhile. The cache was supposed to be under some rocks. We kind of wonder if the whole thing was a scam just to get people to drive up to a high security place and be harassed by the police.

After a quick stop at Taco Bell, we went to our last search on Smallpox Island, right across the bridge from Alton. By this time it was completely dark outside so it’s a good thing we brought my Mag Lite. This one was interesting because you had to go to some coordinates, read the smallpox memorial to get clues to NEW coordinates. Then you went to those and counted the number of stairs to the top. After that it was kind of a letdown. I’m supposed to email the number of steps to this guy and I’m not sure what I’ll get in return for that. Probably nothing. But we had a lot of fun doing all this. There seems to be a lot of caches in the Alton area so I’m going to print them all out and do a lot more this weekend.

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