Jellyfish and a moonless night

We've been having ourselves a most wondrous adventure this evening!

We went to Warwick in search of a multicache, and soon enough we could tell that it was out on a spit of land .15 mile from the shore. There was a path leading out to it... or would be, at a tide level much lower than the one we were facing at present.

We walked up as close as we could get along the causeway, anyhow, to admire the view. Such a pretty view... white swans sailing along the bay shores, feral cats scampering through the woods, and leafy overhangs of sweet bright green.

ri_whittlesey called out, suddenly, and pointed to two fine Canadian Geese and their little brood of six fuzzy yellow goslings. I tried to get as close as I could with the camera, and as I crept along the rocks I looked down and saw two kinds of jellyfish floating in the tides.

I sat down to photograph the jellyfish, passing a long while perched on my stone as jellyfish are tricky to capture on camera. When I finally decided that I'd gotten them as good as I could get, I looked up - and there, in the waning twilight, the tide had fallen and there was a navigable pathway across to the spit.

It was a crazy idea to traverse the causeway and the breakwater when it was all ready getting towards dark, but well, we are the right kind of crazy and it only took us a moment's thought to decide to go ahead. There was maybe 1/2 hour of useable light left, and .15 mile to cross, so there was a chance that we could succeed in our search.

We picked our way carefully across the rocks, and through the damp trails on the slender islets. There were many, many boulders to scramble up and down, but we made it safely and triumphantly across. I deciphered the clue right away since we simply didn't have time to search a wide area, and it directed us to look for a U-shaped tree.

There were a few candidates, and we began looking between tree limbs and under roots. It was definitely getting dark, and harder to see things under the tree canopy. Richard found one tree that seemed possible, with lots of rocks piled near the base in such a way that looked like they'd been arranged by human hands, but nothing was apparent beneath them.

As he went off in search of other U trees, I decided to give that tree a last scour. There was a hole beneath the roots, with a seashell sitting at the base. It looked like that was all there was, but I decided to take a stick and prod about just in case. As I did, the stick struck something hollow and rattly off to the side... and bingo, there was our jar!

I could barely see the numbers on the piece of paper inside the jar that gave us our next coordinates. But I wrote 'em down, and had Richard double-check 'em. Then we took some celebratory photographs, admired the twinkling lights of the Mt. Hope bridge in the distance, and picked our way back. I felt much more nimbled-footed, traversing the rocks back in triumph, even though it was much harder to see. When we got to the point where the lowering tide had uncovered just enough rocks to climb across before, we found that there was now an even lower tide and a fully clear path.

The achievement merited a celebratory meal, and so we went to an excellent Indian restaurant on Wickenden Street, savoring wonderful parathas, papadum and chutneys; a hearty palak paneer; and a beautifully sizzling array of tandoori-grilled vegetables, dipped in a tomato-yogurt sauce. We rolled out of there an hour later in well-stuffed contentment.

Tomorrow we drive back down to Warwick, there to find the next leg of that cache! :-)

After .7 miles of jetty-hopping...

...ri_whittlesey and I successfully procured the final canister of the multicache that began our adventure last night.

We added some cormorants and a red tanker to our list of sightings, and rewarded ourselves with yet another brownie from Lindsay's Market. We had one yesterday and I think that they just *might* join patgreene's brownies in the ranks of "contenders for best brownie in the world" status ;-)

Now Richard and I are going off in search of 2 travel bugs that just *have* to make their way to brian1789. One wants to visit NASA bases, the other yearns for good Mars-viewing sites. Clearly I need to find these and bring them to him for further dispersal!