Geocaching with "thepaytons"

And anther cache found.  The latitude & longitude for “Some fun in Dahlonega” puts it in the hallway between a couple of restaurants.  Even the Google Maps pointer says it’s there.  So we went in and I asked the server at the desk, “If I said I was looking for a geocache, would you give me a blank stare?”  She said that, actually, she’s heard that question before, but as far as she knew there was no cache in there.  One time, they let a guy do a bunch of searching all over, but he didn’t find anything.

We checked the hint, and it made it pretty clear where it was, so we went to that spot, and my younger daughter found it quickly, hiding in plain sight.

The cache was well stocked, but mostly with pencils, magnet letters and a few little toys. The travel bugs that were supposedly in there, weren’t.

Took nothing, left nothing, signed the log, got the smiley.

I told my older son to go back to the restaurant and let them know where they could redirect geocachers in the future.  (Not too specifically, of course.)  When he came back, he said that there were 3 waitresses at the desk.  When he told the one we’d met before our message, one of the other said, “Oh, are you one of those crazy people with GPS’s?”

Yes.  Yes we are.

I went up to Cleveland for one day on business, and thought this would be the best time to drop a geocoin that is trying to get the the northeast United States.  The client was done with me at around 3pm, so I went out to find a nearby cache that was also a “travel bug hotel”; one specifically purposed to trade trackables.

This was in a grown up area between businesses and at first I was concerned that I’d have to venture into the scrub.  I did a little bit, but then I decided to think like a cache hider, assessed the terrain rather than blindly following the GPS, and immediately found it.

I dropped in the coin, signed the log, and headed out for the airport.  Added one more state to our list of cache finds.

Having received word that the first cache we ever tried to find — a 5-stage multi-cache — had had its 3rd stage replace (it disappeared a couple months ago), and with all the kids home from their summer activities, we decided to make another attempt.

(See here, here and here for previous attempts.)

The 3rd stage is closer to the end of the Greenway away from the parking lot, so we parked in a business at the other end and started down the trail.  We made it back to the place that we knew the previous stage 3 had been.  After some searching, one of my sons went back to stage 2 to ensure that the coordinates were indeed the same.  He had trouble getting the laminated papers out of the bison tube, so he brought it to us to work on.

While I was in the search area, I picked up a stick to try to get it out, while my younger daughter watched.  I then heard her say, “Hey, we have the coordinates.”  I said, “No, I’m still trying to get them out.”  She replied, “No, here they are!”  She had just turned her head and immediately found the clue, not 6 inches from either of us!  After entering them into our Blackberries, we beat a hasty retreat, as a nearby honey bee had stung my older daughter, twice.

On to stage 4.  By this time, my sister-in-law and her two boys had come by to help us hunt.

It was getting hot, though, and after about 10 minutes of searching, we were a little frustrated (lots of thorns) and sweaty, so we left, at least knowing we’d made progress.

On our way back from our vacation in NY, one of my daughters was returning from Canada with a Bible Quiz team to the coach’s house near Greenville, SC.  We got there early, and they were late anyway, so we spent some time doing some caching near the exit we had a nice leisurely dinner.

We found a concentration of caches near a mall and started looking.  One was around the nearby movie theater and we found it pretty quickly.  This time, I was the one that found it.

The second attempted one was on a side road near the highway.  It’s name, “Behind the Holly” was clearly a clue to where it was, but that holly is pretty darn prickly, so after a few attempts at a quick find, we decided to bail out.  If this was truly behind the holly, we weren’t dressed for that.

Our last stop was at a cache called “Four-Get-Me-Knots”.  This is hidden in a very clever fashion, and we’d almost given up on it until we realized that the title of the cache was indeed a clue.

But indeed we finally found it, and signed the log.

Along the way, we found a muggle.

With that, it was getting too dark, so we headed out to pick up the daughter and head on home.

We went to upstate NY for a week of a vacation with my family.  My folks big 50th anniversary was during the weekend, and before the boys started at a music conservatory for the week, one of them and I went caching.  I’d scanned the web site for potential finds nearby before we travelled up there, but our searching was rather fruitless.

The first one we went looking for boasted a scenic view of Ithaca and Cayuga Lake.  We found the view but not the cache.

We also went to nearby Ithaca College to look for some, but had similar results.  There was one near a small pond that we had high hopes for, but came up empty.  In both cases, folks after us found the cache, so clearly we left out cache-sense back home.