I work from home on all but a handful of days each year, and I normally dread the days that I work in the office because each one ends up being a very long day with the added three hours of commuting. Yesterday was a pleasant exception to that. I woke up early and was on the road by 6:20am, and I was sitting at my desk in Orem before 8:00am. My team had planned a potluck lunch, to which I brought some homemade coleslaw, though I ate very lightly because I had planned on attending a lunch with some guys from Bogley.com at 1:00pm. The potluck was nice–I rarely get to see my co-workers in person–and I ate quiche for the first time there.
For the Bogley lunch, several of us got together at Thai Village in American Fork. I had never met any of the guys there, but I felt like I already knew several of them. One of them (Dan) I was familiar with because of geocaching, but we had also never met in person. We planned on doing some geocaching after each of us got off work at around 5:00pm. The food at Thai Village was excellent (I had a huge plate of cashew chicken), and I loved the building as well–it looks like an old (though large) house that was converted into a restaurant–and I would highly recommend eating there.
I returned to work after lunch and worked until just before 5:00, and then I decided to find some geocaches close to the office while I waited for Dan to call me. I was a few hundred feet from my second cache when Dan called my cell phone and told me that his wife had just made some dinner and asked if I wanted to eat at their place before we went out geocaching. I was still full from eating two lunches, but I ate dinner at Dan’s anyway, which ended up making me laugh–she had made quiche, so it was the second time in my life, and the second time that day, that I’d eaten the dish.
After eating, Dan and I headed up Dry Canyon to find the oldest multi-cache in Utah. Luckily Dan had printed out the cache listing before we left his place. We accidentally took the most difficult route to the first stage of the multi, and by the time we got there we couldn’t find it. There was a hint on the printout that helped us locate it quickly (after actually taking the time to read it), then we had to determine how to enter the coordinates to the second and final stage into our GPS units, as those coords were in UTM format. Once we got that figured out, we made the relatively easy hike farther up the mountainside to the final cache location. Our total hiking distance was only 1.6 miles, but the foothills of Mount Timpanogos are steeper terrain than I’m used to hiking in, so it was a good workout. I hadn’t hiked or geocached much in northern Utah, and this was a new and fun experience.
We got back down off the mountain just after the sun had set, then Dan drove me back to my car at his apartment and we parted ways. The drive home was in complete darkness, which I was glad for because I hate driving at dusk when it’s too light for the headlights to do any good, but too dark to see down the road clearly–mostly I worry about hitting deer or elk at that time though. I kept my foot on the gas pedal when I couldn’t see headlights approaching from the opposite direction, and let off the gas whenever I saw headlights around the next curve or hill, and I barely made it home in time to tuck the boys into bed at 9:30.
All in all it was a great day, and if I can manage to plan my days in the office around lunch get-togethers and geocaching like that, I may work in Orem more often. 🙂