My first WeekNIGHT

I went to my first WeekNIGHT caching event last night in Cottage Grove. This one was hosted by broken tooth. It was nice socializing with everyone, including:

• Millah -- I picked Millah up, and we thought we'd have all kinds of time for pre-caching, but we pulled into Hamlet Park's parking lot just in time to start. We underestimated the time to get to Cottage Grove.
  
• broken tooth -- A couple weeks ago I grabbed an early morning puzzle cache that was placed by broken tooth's son K-3. I thought I might get FTF on that one, but when I pulled into the parking lot, Millah and DLHCacher were chatting, having just found the cache.
  
• sir_zman -- It was nice to meet him finally, after emailing back and forth about ways to use geocaching in educational programs. He spent some of the time (but not ALL of the time!) capturing audio, presumably for his podcast.
  
• Bus&Betty -- The nicest couple you'd ever want to meet. There are a lot of nice caching couples in the Twin Cities! They do a lot of traveling and so had stories about how the natural pitfalls of geocaching are different in different places.
  
• cstjohn -- We talked a good bit about pathtags and the perils of turning on the "allow trades" button. I grabbed her pathtag out of Due We Dez Maul, the awesome library cache up in White Bear Lake.
  
• TheCollector -- Millah and I grabbed his mall series in Burnsville on the way down to Lakeville last Sunday, and we also found an unpublished cache of his without realizing it. He was trying to publish in a place near the final location of a puzzle cache (that we were looking for).
  
• MN_Cavepeople -- with the understated and wry sense of humor. I mean, just look at the picture on his profile! It was great telling stories with everyone over dinner and drinks at Ruby Tuesday.
  

I took a wrong turn on the way from the caching to the restaurant, and Millah and I found ourselves within 100 feet of a nano cache in front of a grocery store, so we stopped and picked that one up on the way to dinner. I think some of the others stopped for that one after dinner.

Getting home was not pleasant. The roads were horrible. In fact, the old '99 Accord is getting new tires today. Also, I had to make an emergency Valentines stop for the kids. Can't leave any of their classmates out on Valentine's Day. When you have twins, you have to get two of everything, and when they're giving Valentines to their classmates, that adds up!

What am I giving my kids for Valentine's Day? How about the gift of me not geocaching? Maybe some other stuff too. That's not totally fair -- the mini-double-bass likes geocaching too!