Of weewahs, treasure hunts, and bizarre golf carts

I got quite a lot done today, and am generally quite pleased with myself. Between St. George Island and Cape San Blas, I identified seven or eight potential research sites, four or five of which are really promising.

I am also absolutely wiped out, and will sleep the sleep of the just tonight before tackling the seven-hour drive home tomorrow morning.

Things I learned today:

• Hiking through sand is a bitch. Okay, so I already knew this. But I reaffirmed it today during my three-mile hike on St. George Island State Park.
  
• I met a guy today who was geocaching. I had never heard of this thing, but I think it sounds like a damn fine idea. For those of you who are as out-of-touch as I am, it's essentially a treasure hunt - hence, inherently, it rocks. You use a GPS to locate a box whose coordinates have been published online, sign a log book inside when you find it, and if you like you can do a sort of treasure exchange: Take something out of the box, and leave something in exchange. The guy who showed me the cache he was hunting left a softball. There were also some keychains and a little plastic recorder in the box.
  
• Today I realized that if I ever have kids, I'm going to be one of those crazy parents who packs them all up in the RV every summer, despite all their bitching and moaning, and takes them camping across the US. We'll go to national parks and monuments and keep elaborate logs of our geocaches, and the kids will want to disown me by the time they're twelve. And someone'll make a slapstick movie about it: Elisel's Great Geocaching Vacation, or something.
  
• Talking about the price of gas today, a woman told me she was from Weewah. Which is short for Weewahitchka, but still, I was proud of myself for not giggling.
  
• Yeah. Premium gas down here has broken the $4 barrier. I filled up on regular at $3.89 a gallon. God bless the Prius.
  
• I saw a family of 4 pedaling a golf cart down the street today. No, seriously, it was like - a golf cart with pedals for all the riders. An aerobicsy golf cart. Also known as the Fred Flintstone-mobile. That's all I could think about when I saw it.
  
• I went up a flight of stairs to the ice cream shop over a local gift shop today. At the top of the stairs was a sign on the wall: "You have just climbed off one scoop of calories." It made me laugh.
  


So, yeah. Good day.

Now if only I could convince my mother that I'm capable of going on a road trip without needing her to call me every five hours.