Breakfast in the Balmy Burbs 2013

Every January one of our area geocachers named "Greenback" hosts a fantastic breakfast event.  Usually it's called The Breakfast in the Blustery Burbs because in a normal year, it would be freezing cold and snowy here.  This year, with temperatures in the 40's, it was downright balmy instead.  No matter, it's always a good time!

This year the breakfast was at Golden Corral, which is one of my favorite buffet restaurants.  They have a really extensive menu and a chocolate fountain - what's not to like about that??

The breakfast portion of the event usually runs from around 7:30 am until 9:00 am.  It gets very crowded, because like I said, it's a very popular event here....

We load up our plates.  Poor Snoopy looks like he needs a bath....

 and then we sit and visit with old friends and make some new ones.  Mary, Tom and Carmen...

Crazy Mikey who loves to give hugs.....

My really good friends Mary and Tom...

Mary bought Snoopy for me a few years ago and we always get an Event picture with him!

The famous chocolate fountain and my buddy Bill.....

Glenn and I reached our 2000th milestone cache on the same day last spring.  Since then he's blown past me and I have a lot of running to do to catch up....

Bret is one of my favorite guys ever...

Mom chatting with Bill....

Linda and Rick.  The 3 of them make up a formidable caching team....

There is usually have a drawing and Greenback gives out some geocache themed prizes before the breakfast is over.  That's Greenback in the bright green shirt....

They always release a bunch of new caches so everyone eats and leaves to go look for some.  We took off armed with GPS units and a list of new geocaches....

 For me, it's a lot of fun to just run around and look for geocaches and meet new cachers at the cache locations.

We all introduce ourselves and look for the caches together.  It's just a nice way to meet new people.  That's my dad peering over the fence....

Me doing the GPS shuffle......

On the 3rd cache I knelt on something sharp and scraped the crap out of my knee.  It bled like crazy for about 20 minutes....

A little later we met up with Linda, Rick and Bill and we decided to hang with them for awhile....

Look at my knee and you can see the blood seeping through my jeans....

On the next cache I was plowing through some brush and took a torn branch to the face, which resulted in several thorn pricks, which then proceeded to bleed down my face....  Man, I really took a few hits for the team today!

This next cache was the most difficult of the day, but it was my favorite one as well.  It was well hidden someplace on this bridge...

Another cacher who had found it earlier in the day stopped by and handed me his flashlight, gave me the tip to "use a stick" and I soon had the elusive cache in hand.

There is something about open, running water in January that is just so wrong in Chicago.....

In all we found 12 caches for the day and had a really good time, even me, despite my bloody body parts.  We even found a street with a very appropriate name.....

So thanks again to Greenback for all his hard work that goes into hosting this fabulous annual event.  If you're a geocacher I really urge you to go attend some of the events.  You'll have a good time and meet lots of new people.