Geogirl - Kelly Rysten

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of buying gas and I needed space. It was a win win situation.”

      “Did you tell him your car gets lousy gas mileage?”

      “It depends on how you drive it.”

      “And how is Ned going to drive it?”

      “We’ll tell him that later.”

      “And what about this?” I asked. “We have to put gas in this thing for the summer.”

      “No worries.”

      One thing that I liked about Twiggy also irritated me to the point of frustration. He never worried about anything. Maybe I’m a realist. Maybe I inherited “proper” genes from my mom, but I thought if we were going on a 500 mile trip with several detours along the way we should make sure we would be able to pay for gas.

      Chugga, chugga, chu…uuga went the van down the road and I began to smell something that I didn’t want to smell. I didn’t know what it was but it smelled like something in the engine was overheating. I didn’t say anything, because men like to notice engine problems on their own, but I rode along wondering if we would get back to campus without catching fire. When we did reach the parking lot of my dorm Twiggy jumped out of the van, threw open the sliding door on the side and said, “Now all we have to do is make this little beauty livable!”

      Little beauty?

      “It looks like a giant avocado got dropped into the zebra pen at the zoo,” I said.

      “Aw come on. You’re a girl. You can make the van into a comfy little geocaching paradise.”

      I thought he was nuts.

      One thing there always is around a university campus when the students are going home for the summer is pillows and furniture that nobody wants to haul home. Frequently that furniture was picked up off the street anyway so it was no big loss to just leave it by a Dumpster for the incoming freshmen. Somehow with each semester of college the dorm rooms improved a little each time, unless you had parents who saw to your every need like I did. Our trip to the storage unit involved mostly boxes, because only boxes would fit into Twiggy’s car. But I still had a mushroom chair and there was a futon mattress and two pillows left by the Dumpster. I thought things were going a little too smoothly when I put all our boxes of clothes around the edges of the van, spread out the futon mattress and it fit perfectly. I wasn’t sure what to do with the mushroom chair but thought it couldn’t hurt to be able to slouch about occasionally so I put it against one wall of the van and stepped back. The pillows were a bit big for our needs but I decided if we were roughing it then big pillows weren’t much to complain about.

       Chapter 4

      “I’m not sure I am doing this right,” I confessed to Twiggy the next morning at breakfast. I had an appointment in three hours to have my room inspected and hand the keys back over to the super.

      “There is no right way or wrong way to do it,” he said. “You look for the caches you want to find. You ignore the ones you don’t want to find.”

      “But we still have a goal,” I pointed out.

      “That’s why I put you in charge of planning. You like to keep track of details. I like to tromp around in the hills and find boxes.”

      “But you’re asking a freshman geocacher to master a Geocaching 400 task.”

      “You’re a smart kid. I have faith in you. I know you can do it.”

      “I did find some interesting ones, but nobody will say why they are so interesting. They just say things like ‘good hide, very creative, wish I knew how to do this.’”

      “See, you’re getting the hang of it. And when we find a few of those you’ll see why they made those comments.”

      “After I turn in my keys I think we should go find one. I need some experience to base my decisions on.”

      “You want to? Cool! So… which one looks interesting within a mile or two or three?”

      “Hmm, they are interesting in different ways,” I said sounding rather overwhelmed by all the choices I’d seen on my little laptop the previous night. “Like… look at this one. It hardly says anything in the description but the logs make it sound like we should find it. Here’s a log that says, ‘been around a while. Never seen a geocache like this one.’ And another says. ‘wish I had thought of this!’ and another, ‘never would have spotted this except dogwalker sniffed it out.’”

      “Hmm, and twenty-nine favorite points. We should go look.”

      “But what about this one,” I said. “It says, ‘follow the trail until you get to the old bridge. Don’t get your feet wet. It’s hidden where the sun don’t shine and you might need some sun to spot it.’ That sounds kind of vague to me. People like it, but I don’t see why.”

      He cracked a little grin that said to me that he knew this contest was working. Working on what I wasn’t sure. “Maybe we should go find out,” he said.

      “It’s four miles away.”

      “I bet I can drive four miles. You can drive four miles. If you can do it, I can too.”

      “You’ll have to download the coordinates,” I reminded him needlessly.

      “I’ve got them. I’ve got all the geocaches in town already in my GPS. All I need is some general directions that we can get from the map so we’re halfway there already.”

      He stuffed the last corner of his toast into his mouth and held up his hand for the ticket.

      The old van chugged down the city streets, down the country roads and onto a dirt path. Just seeing the dirt path made me think I was off on an adventure. I was a city girl, raised in a proper four bedroom, two bath house, with neighbors close by, a side walk to rollerblade on, peaceful streets to ride bicycles on. We knew our neighbors and walked to school.

      Trees crowded the road and Twiggy seemed to relax more the further he drove. He stopped the van in the middle of the road and got out his GPS. He clicked a few buttons and scanned a menu. He clicked down a couple of times and toggled the little joystick to the right.

      “We’re sitting in the middle of the road,” I pointed out.

      “It’s okay. Nobody ever travels this road and if they do I’ll let them by.”

      “How did it get to be a road if nobody travels it?” I asked.

      His GPS displayed a map and he put the van in reverse and turned around.

      “One street too early,” he explained.

      “This is a street?”

      “Of course!”

      Little did I know that in geocaching terms this street was a highway. But I couldn’t really blame Twiggy. I was the one who chose the caches we looked for. I just had no inkling where they were. I chose them because they sounded fun.

      Twiggy drove back to the pavement, turned right and skipped a paved road, then turned right on another dirt road. I gawked at all the lush forest plants that crowded the road. Plants even grew in between the tire ruts. It felt like we drove for miles on the dirt road but it couldn’t have been miles because this place was four miles from Donner’s. When Twiggy stopped the van and turned off the engine I could hear water. I looked around to see where the noise was coming from as Twiggy popped open his door and slid out.

      “Ahhh, fresh air, green trees, and not a textbook in sight!” he said as he stretched. “Do you want the GPS?”

      “No, I’m just along to help out and learn a thing or two about what we’ll be doing the next couple of days,” I answered.

      “Then take the GPS. You need to learn how to use the number one

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