Geocaching with "thepaytons"

While I happened to have our entire brood in town, we decided to go to a nearby mall to visit a niece of mine and just window shop. Nearby was a geocache, so we brought along a travel bug we’d picked up recently to drop off.

This one is located in tall grass by a retainer pond across the street from the mall. Clearly, they have beavers here.

My GPS was giving us fits, but I’d recalled the general area I saw on the map where the cache was, so we checked it out.

While Mommy watched us look all around, she did a little looking and found it herself, so we all headed over.

While it’s a nice cache that will stand up to the weather, it won’t handle a moderately sized traveler.

So we took nothing, left nothing, and signed the log.

With 3 of my kids away for the summer (one at college for the summer semester and two working at a summer camp), my youngest is certainly a bit lonely. So today we decided to go out to do some geocaching together; something he’s been looking forward to.

First, a weather report. It hadn’t rained for quite some time in our area, and indeed drought conditions were starting to take hold. But this afternoon we finally got a nice pop-up thunderstorm that indeed hung around for about 30 minutes. The good news is, we needed it. The bad news is, it hampered our geocaching, even hours after it had left.

Our first stop was at an antique store behind which was a cache.

The problem was that the cache location seemed to be in a bunch of bushes, but after the rain, my son was not interested in poking through wet bushes, so we went on to our next stop.

This was at a Lutheran church, and the name of the cache is "Ninety-Five Thesis"; rather appropriate.

But again the wet foliage slowed us down. We did get into what we thought was the zone, but after a short look around, we moved on.

The next stop I wanted to  make was at the home of the cacher nicknamed "Flamingomama". As of this date, she’s hidden 68 caches, many around this area, and we’ve found some of them. I reminded my son of some of the caches of hers that we’d found. Less than a month ago, she hid a cache in her front yard, so we decided to look for it and hopefully meet her.

When we arrived, there was no question we were at the right place.

We knocked on the door, but alas, no one was home. So off we went into her front yard to look for the ammo can hidden there.

After a short search, my son did indeed find it. We opened it up and the container was quite full of stuff.

There was a trackable inside, and so we took it to move it along, and left some spooky, glow-in-the-dark press-on nails; a gag gift from last Christmas.

My son signed the log, saying that we were sorry to have missed them, and then re-hid the can.

Now, see, we have to go out again some time to move the trackable, so that guarantees another geocaching hunt.

I went with one of my daughters to visit Mercer University as a potential place for her to go to college. We arrive in Macon from Atlanta in rather good time, and we had an hour to kill. Of course, geocaching came to mind, and I was eager to try out the geocaching app on my new Android phone (c:geo).

There are 2 on or very near the campus. One is a difficulty 4 (though the description said it had, at one point, been a difficulty 5) and one is a virtual. We tried the physical cache first, having never tried one this difficult before. Having read how hard some 5s are, I was wondering if we’d be successful, even if it since had been downgraded to 4. The logs said that it had been rated easier, but then increased as many folks could not find it. The cache is called “IVP but not IPV”. The GPS brought us to Ingleside Village Pizza (“IVP”), and the description told us it was not “in plain view” (“IPV”). It also noted that the cache owner had not see this particular hiding place type before, so the obvious searching of bushes felt unneeded.

I don’t want to give away too much, so I’ll say this; looking at this spot suggested a particular hiding place to us (but not the green box, because the description specifically said it’s not associated with that). We searched for about 10 minutes, and almost left, but just before doing so, my daughter tried one more place and it turned out to be the right spot. While there were few muggles around, we hurried off back to the car to sign the log.

The virtual cache is called “Jesse the Baptist”. Mercer University is a Baptist university started by Jesse Mercer, and there is a bench with a bronze Jesse on campus. Surrounding the bench is a circle of stones with different words of inspiration he said, and to get credit for the virtual you had to either e-mail the cache owner a picture or one of the thoughts.

We walked through the campus on the way there and enjoyed the beauty of this wonderful spring day (though it started, as we found out, with a 6am tornado warning from strong storms that moved through the night before).

And then, there was Jesse.

A little later, we watched a video at the opening session for the campus visit, which noted that freshmen rub Jesse’s head for luck, and then the graduation seniors do, as they file in for commencement.

We took a picture by one of the words of inspiration, and went to register for the campus visitation day. A very nice start to the day.

When we went out to do the searching, we did not realize we were on this particular milestone. We tried again to look for stage 4 of the old stand-by, the 5-stage-multi greenway trail near us. We’d gotten a bit of a hint that it was on the ground (as opposed to up in a tree), but that didn’t help enough.

However, a new greenway trail on the other side of the town was recently completed, and two caches were placed at the two ends (it forks). We went to find one of them.

The GPS gave me some bad information right at the start. It seemed like no matter where we were, the target was 50 feet away. After some frustrating clambering in the woods, we noticed that the distance got smaller the closer we got to where we were entered. We got to the zone and I located it in about 20 seconds.

Don’t have any real good pictures of the find, because we didn’t realize the significance of the find. And we didn’t bring a pen to sign the log. The kids bike there often, so they may come back later and sign it.

But we made it to 50 today!

March 24: My daughter, working at a co-op job as part of her college studies, spends a couple days a week at my sister’s and help her take care of her two toddlers. On one of those evenings, they went out "treasure hunting" ("geocaching" means nothing to a 2-year-old) at a nearby park.

She chose the cache to look for because the log entries all said how easy it was to find. It was indeed simple, and the kids loved it.

March 26: A couple days later, my sons went on a camping trip to Stone Mountain, and they followed the orienteering trail. At one of the checkpoints, they found a cache. My older son, not having anything with him, just signed the log