09-25-2004...I went to Birmingham, Alabama last week for work. There's a company down there that makes composite rods that we need for a trauma product and I am on the team that is charged with validating their process. The good part about all this is they seem to really know what they're doing, they've already done a lot of the work we need them to do, and we had plenty of time after the meetings for geocaching in a totally new location. I brought the whole team out looking for a cache at a hilly park in town, which was really cool. Rocky trails up and down steep hills, a stone amphitheater, wooded areas, the whole bit. We found the cache, which was just full of good stuff. I dropped off a travel bug I'd picked up at home and took a toy Mini Cooper for Alex. One of the other guys in the group wanted to go look for some more caches, but we looked for three others and found none. One at an air park was not accessible due to being closed, one at another park was missing (we presume, after looking for a long time in an area without much place to hide, and one had too much muggle activity to look for. Later in the day we ate at a BBQ restaurant recommended by my manager, who just happened to get her PhD at UAB, then I took the car to visit Jim and Judy, who just happened to be staying in B'ham with friends because Hurricane Ivan trashed their hometown.