But I Digress...

I need to tell you something.  Please sit down and brace yourself. It is quite shocking and not for the weak of heart.

 Ready? Here it goes:

As strange as this may sound, geocaching is not the most important thing to my wife.

Thats crazy right?  Normally I would not speak of such things in polite company, but it is an important revelation that must be fully dealt with in order to completely come to terms with the events that happened to me yesterday.

At 9AM or so we all piled into the Geo-van of Destiny and headed south to Gastonia in search of... adventure quilting supplies.

Yes, my wife is a quilter.  She quilts. She is a lady of the pieced cloth.  She is quite good at it, and sometimes she needs to get new fabrics. Gastonia has one of the largest fabric stores around so it was a good place to get the things she needed.

But thats not what I came to tell you about.
You see by 2PM we had collected all of the fabrics that my wife required  to feed her nefarious quilting habit, and had even managed to feed ourselves and let the kids have some play time.  So we pointed the car northeast to the Latta Plantation Park on beautiful Mountain Island Lake to go hiking, and even to find a geocache or four.

When we arrived 30 minutes later both kids were asleep, so my wife stayed in the van while I went out to find a cache on my own.

I was approaching GZ when I heard gunshots not terribly far off in the distance. Not an unusual sound when living in the South, but this was pretty close, and unusual given I was in a park. At first it was just one shot... then two... then some automatic fire from a different gun... soon it sounded like a pitch battle was taking place nearby.

Well I have never been thrust in the middle of combat while out geocaching before, so with a puzzled look on my face I found the cache and signed the log (priorities first) before heading off to see what the fuss was about.  Shockingly my worst fears were soon confirmed.

I found myself in the middle of a war.

You see, It turns out the Plantation was being used by a group of WWII re-enactors, and they had been re-enacting a battle (not sure which one given the western front was in Europe, but I am sure it was terribly exciting). There were many people dressed up as American and German soldiers milling about and doing interesting historically accurate military things.

But thats not what I came to tell you about.

You see, when the kids woke up we all headed off into the woods in search of a couple of geocaches.  We had some bumps and bruises along the way (tree roots being the main nemesis of the adventuring toddler).  We had a wonderful time picking ourselves up, brushing ourselves off, and bravely fighting back tears, as we walked farther down the path, heading deeper into the woods.

Amidst a rather magical moment of nature we located the geocaches in question, and had a rather good time. Our mission complete we headed back to the van.

It was getting late, and my wife and I had a date night planned, so we headed back home.  Along the way we saw one of the most dramatic sunsets I have ever seen.

...and that is what I came to tell you about.