Smokestack!

My friend Ben (who I refer to as Wolf Boy in my logs.  We started calling him Wolf Boy one evening after going to an upscale steak house with a bunch of friends. The waitress asked Ben, who has bigger and weirder hair than Don King and Donald Trump put together, how he wanted his steak done, and he looked at her like a deer in the headlights. Then he looks at me and says "Uhhh.... DJ, how do I want my steak done?"  Like this is the first steak he's ever ordered in his life!  I've seen this guy eat a whole cow in one sitting!  But for some reason he's forgotten how to order.  So, me being the good friend I am and always looking for a way to embarrass my best friend in front of others say, "Don't mind him, he was orphaned as a child and raised by wolves, and this is his first night out"  Thus the Wolf Boy moniker. ) who I drag along geocaching once in a while, said after finding the tenth 35mm film canister of the day, "That's it?  We drove 25 miles out here in the boonies, and then spend thirty minutes circling around in these woods, and all we find is a piece of plastic?  I think there should be a law saying you can't place these things unless there is something cool near by, like a roller coaster or something."  (He's always spouting off about rollercoaters, but you take him to Vegas and try to get him on the one on top of the Stratosphere, and he's all, "There is no *bleeping* way I'm getting on that thing!"  I know, I've tried.) 

Anyway, Ben calls me up this morning and says, "Hey let's go do something."  So we go through the usual routine of, "What do you want to do?" "I don't care what to you want to do?"  "Oh, I don't care, ride a roller coaster or something?"  "Ok," I say exasperatedly, "I'll pick you up in an hour." 

So I get on the interwebitudes, and go to wanderindianaI'mboredwhatistheretodoaroundhere.com and come up with Fast Times Karting on the north side of Indy, about 75 miles from here.  Also being the crazy cacher that I am, I load up 20 or so park and grabs between here and there into my GPSr.  I pick Ben up and he immediately asks where are we going.  I decide, since he's a downer on geocaching that all I'm telling him is that we are going to take a leisurly drive up to Indy, in the hopes that after geocaching and karting he'll change his mind about caching.  But he takes one look at my phone sitting in it's craddle up on the dash with Google Maps pulled up and sighs, "We're not going spelunking again are we?"  Ben is a little...uh little,...uh how can I say this....scatterbrained?...which means he sometimes forgets what things are called, like geocaching is called spelunking and Bucca di Beppo's is called Beepo's and he forgets that he likes his steaks done medium rare, that sort of thing.  Every sentence is an adventure with Ben.

So after grabbing a few park and grabs at cemeteries and the such with Wolfie sitting in the car, I decide to chuck the geocaching out the door and just drive on up to the Kart place without stopping for anymore caches.  One of the caches, Smokestack!, reminded me of my childhood.  Here is the cache description:

Many years ago, Batman went with some friends to an Indianapolis Indians baseball game, traveling north on Hwy 37. As they reached this approximate place on the highway, someone in the car yelled "Smokestack!" Batman was puzzled, and someone pointed out the smokestack on the horizon (which, as it turns out, it just inside the I-465 loop). According to the friend, this was a "game" they played in their family; on any trip towards Indianapolis each person tried to be the first to spot the smokestack and yell "Smokestack!" No points were awarded or anything - it was just for fun and gloating privileges.

Batman brought the game idea home to Catwoman and they've played it for years. But Catwoman rarely gets the first sighting - Batman has a keen eye! In fact, if we had to estimate the score since Batman and Catwoman first learned of the game, it's probably 1,288 to 3.

Depending on the time of the year, the smokestack can sometimes be seen sooner than this point on the highway. But we placed this cache so we could share the smokestack game with you. Enjoy the cache - it's an easy park and grab!

Here is my log:

My wife and I play a similar silly game with forsythia. Years ago my mother tortured me as a kid and made me and my sister go yard-saling (is that a word?) with our mother and her friends. As we drove around all over the state, my mother and her friend would have to call out, "Ohh what a pretty forsythia, ohhhh look at that one, oh there is another one over there"..... ad nauseam. So years later my sister and I are chuckling about this in front of my wife, retelling the horrible situation our mother put us through.  So what does my darling wife do the next spring? Calls me at work, shouts "Forsythia!" into the phone, and hangs up.

So now it's a challenge each spring to spot the first blooming forsythia of the season and ring the other up for bragging rights.

Then a few years back I was visiting my sister in the fall and she was talking about wanting to put a "foddershock" in her yard. I ask her what in the world is a "foddershock?" And she explained that it was a bundle of cornstalks with straw bales and pumpkins and other fall stuff sitting around it as a yard decoration. So on the way home I spotted one, pointed it out, and yelled "FODDERSHOCK!" So now we play that stupid game.

Then one day, I was commenting on the amazing number of large metal decorative stars on peoples homes everywhere around our house. A few weeks later we went on an all day road trip/geocaching adventure and I pointed out a star on someone's home and said, "Look there's another one. And over there's another one. And another one." So we played that stupid game all day. Those stars are everywhere!

Now it's evolved to cover just about everything. Who spots the first christmas decorations, fireworks stand, easter egg tree, etc...Now thanks to you we have a new game to play. "Smokestack!" It's a good thing we don't have kids, or we would be torturing them as my mother tortured me so many years ago.

TFTC TNLN SL

Ben did find one of the caches interesting today. ISQ #580 Seargent Duke.  Seargent Duke was a Revolutionary War veteran.  It's not every day that you see that in Indiana.

So we eventually made it to Fast Times Karting and Wolf Boy had a blast, even if we are both a little too big for the karts.  Probably because of all the steaks we've eaten.