The Stoogeteers wasted no time in getting started caching in the new year. Werner, X. Marx D’Spot, and myself all loaded up into the Mini this afternoon in a (futile) attempt to reach the 200 cache mark. Things started of promisingly at Jack of Diamonds Holly Tree Gap Getaway, a 2/1 hidden by naivevanguard in the Deerwood Arboretum in Brentwood. We found the cache, and then found out we had no pens on us so Werner sprinted back to the Mini to get one. With pen and cache in hand, we signed the log and left for the next hunt.
Werner on the run.
Our next three finds were all nice and close together back in the woods off Manley Road and all were by prolific area cacher salpal. The first was King Swing’s Rockwall. This 2/2 gave us our second find perhaps our most memorable experience of the day. As we were walking through the woods up to it, we noticed a school bus that looked to be in pretty bad shape out in a clearing to our right. After we found the cache, we went to explore the wreckage. The whole thing was covered in rust, all the windows were gone, the right side tires were blown out, and half the engine was laying on the ground beside it along with some rusty farming equipment. To top it all of, the bus was no longer in the normal driving position but rather precariously perched on its right side. Not what we expected to see in the woods, but it did provide us with something else to poke around along with the caches.
Look, a bus.
We followed a gravel path that wound back through the woods to our next find, a 1.5/1.5 called Swing Away. This cache also came with a diversion: a rope swing. After we found the cache itself, Werner entertained himself by swinging for a bit and several times almost crashed into the tree which would, of course, have been hysterical. From there, it was another short hike down the path and up a hill to the 2/3 known as King of the Hill. Our caching experience showed us exactly where this one was once we got up to it, and we quickly had find number four under our belts.
We then took advantage of Happy Hour at Sonic before heading back up Hillsboro Road to grab Alan’s Side of the Bridge, a 1/1 by none other than salpal. From there, we first failed to find a good parking area to begin our search for A Stroll in the Park and then failed to find the multi-cache itself, giving up the hunt for the sake of time. We will be back for that one though, at some point.
Further south down Hillsboro Road we found cache number six: Behind the Building, in the Trees, a 1.5/2.5 by (drumroll, please) salpal. I saw some geoswag I’d never seen before inside this one, namely a novel. The addition of the book made it a little harder to reseal the container, but we got the job done. We bounded back through the field from whence we’d come as the sun dipped further below the horizon and our time grew more and more limited. In somewhat of a hurry, we drove a little further down and started our search for our final cache of the night: Franklin Foreign Coin Exchange. The difficulty of the 3/3 hide by GeoGyn is especially true for searches conducted just after dusk with no flashlights available. Luckily, the light from an iPod Touch is sufficiently bright to provide enough assistance to locate a cache, though it still a little longer to find the thing in the woods in the dark. We got it, though, just as we were about to call it quits. In celebration, we ran in disorganized formation back to the Mini and listened to Coldplay all the way back to Werner’s house. Hopefully we’ll get those other five caches soon and finally cross over the 200 threshhold.
Halpert
Click here to see the day’s photos on Flickr.
Cache-tastic 