Joel-caching

Hi from MN - it's Natalia, back from the amazing state of Oregon with tales to tell. So some of you have heard of a lovely thing called geocaching. It's where you get coordinates and have to treasure hunt for little containers full of fun knick-knacks. It's a lot of fun... Unless your cache is Joel, he's in the wilderness somewhere, and your gps fails to distinguish the difference between a small overgrown path and an actual road. Tom (the 2008-09 sam and nat roomie), Sam and I took the trusty Honda Element (fondly known as the duckmobile for it's color and team affiliation) and drove into the mountains. First of all, Elements are not 4wheel drive, and not all mountain roads are meant for Elements. Some mountain roads are not roads at all actually. We started out on a nice paved interstate, moved to a nice paved highway, then a nice paved county road, and then somehow we got on an incorrect dirt road, where a lovely set of mountain men asked us if we were trying to "get to somewhere special" (we weren't sure what it meant) and then gave us directions that sort of took us the right way, but we got off track again (darn gps)...at this time we were about an hour later than we told Joel. But we kept on hoping that he would be patient and wait for us. We drove and drove and turned around, and drove, and turned around (now it's almost two hours later than Joel expected) and FINALLY we saw a sign for Olalee lake. Dang that Olalee lake. It's the most beautiful and most hated location in all of Oregon if you are me, Tom, or Sam. We drove right by Joel and didn't see him at first, and had a moment of panic that Joel would leave us a note somewhere saying to meet him at another set of coordinates. He didn't and lucky for him that he didn't because we weren't really at a point where that would have been an option. But, we were victorious. We found Joel, we brought him down the mountain, fed him, gave him to his wife, and spent a glorious evening in Portland eating good food, drinking beer and eating gelato.