Geocaching with "thepaytons"

My college student is working at a co-op job this semester at a place near home, so she’s staying at home and commutes to the office. Today, she got the urge to go out and do some caching near the office on her own. She’d looked up 5 caches she wanted to try, and found 2. Not bad!

Consider, too, that she did this without benefit of GPS! It had been a while since I showed her how to use the application on her Blackberry, and she’d forgotten how it worked. So she looked at the satellite maps closely before she left to direct her.

For one of them, she went from the road into the nearby woods and looked all around for a while. On he way out of the woods, she found near the road!

The other one was near a skating rink that she’d been to before to watch a cousin play hockey.

With these two finds, our count is up to 47, approaching that 50 milestone!

We set out to find 3 caches today, found them all, and then went to a fourth one on the spur of the moment (it was on our way back) which had eluded us 3 previous times, and we found that as well. Very satisfying.

First stop, "Celestal Moola" near a small lake called Lake Lucerne. This was a small parking area right on the lake and right off a rather busy divided highway.

The GPS showed that the spot was close to the water, but in fact it was a bit farther back. We started looking under the bridge and through the thorny scrub brush.

My youngest son had noticed a small path earlier and wandered down it a bit, but came back empty-handed. My older son finally decided to take a look himself and did find the cache.

Not too much in the cache itself, so we took nothing, left nothing and signed the log.

This was a beautiful day for caching.

We moved on to our next stop, at a church just down the highway. It’s a cache that highlights one of the special projects done by Eagle Scouts in the area, one for each of the virtues of the Boy Scout Law. As we approached it, my older son recognized one of the Eagle projects at this site that he helped out with; not the one specifically mentioned on the cache page, but the benches that were built very close to the cache location.

It didn’t take long for my oldest son to find this one, and again, in a place that my youngest son had already looked. (It was frustrating for him, let me tell you.) We brought it over to look through it.

There were some nice little things in there. We didn’t take anything, but we left the trackable we found yesterday. It was called "4Given" and it seemed like a church was a good place to drop it.

And on we went.

The next cache had a particular location, but noted that it was to be moved for a short time. We started looking at the original location, but it was no longer someplace you could reasonably hide anything.

After deciding that we’d have seen it if it was here, we went for the alternate location, which was in a grove of trees. It was easier to look through, I imagine, in winter with all the leaves off the trees.

My younger daughter found it pretty quickly once we got close.

We found a small flashlight-type toy to take. In previous photos, you notice that my older son was wearing a bracelet made of soda can tabs. He brought that in case we wanted to drop it off in a cache, and so we dropped it off here.

We signed the log and started back home.

On our way home, we were going by a cache we’d tried (at least) 3 times before to find. We figured the lack of leaves might help us here, too.

Well, indeed we found it within a couple of minutes, and in a place we’d searched before, but not because it was winter. No spoilers! This time, my oldest found it.

Signed the log, and finished a fantastic day, having gone out looking for 3 and found 4.

It was a gorgeous day in Atlanta; in the 60s, when just a few weeks ago the whole city was shut down due to snow. This was clearly a day to do some caching.

I chose a unique one. It had virtually no information on the geocaching.com page, but you had to go to YouTube to be given a video tour of the cache area. It did have the actual coordinates as well. I don’t think we’d have found it with just the video clues. It was made 4 years ago, and the area has changed a bit, most notably a new subdivision has gone up.

The path to the cache starts at a nearby pool, which has a paved walking trail behind it.

Turn right at the bench.

Hike through the woods  just a little and look for the tree that hides the cache.

We did some searching around until I looked at one tree who’s base looked like the one in the video, and my daughter went over to it and uncovered the cache.

The box was quite well stocked. It had a shrink-wrapped DVD of the original Absent-Minded Professor, a cute plastic pizza cutter, and some nicer swag than we normally find. There was also a trackable called "4Given" that we took to move on.

We signed the log, took the trackable, and replace the cache.

We had a good time, in an area that we’d been in many times before, but never knew a cache was so close by. That happens a lot.

We went out this afternoon to try to find a few more caches today.  Had a late night last night, slept in, hung around the house for some hours, and then I just wanted to get the gang outside.

We went back to the same area as last time, since there were quite a few caches there (mostly micros) but I wanted to try the library one we’d not been able to find.  It just seemed to me that we should be able to find that.

First stop, Taco Bell for "Mexican Ding-a-ling".  We searched around a bit but weren’t able to find it. 

Unlike previously, we were going to do better, percentage-wise.

Our next stop was the library.  Others had found it after we didn’t,  so we were going to give it another shot.  As before, kids were around and in the bushes.

But finally my oldest found it and indeed, like some logs suggested, we’d made it harder than it really was. Although I will say that the camo tape really did its job. We brought it back to the (warm) car and signed the log. We took nothing but left a make-up brush we’d picked up elsewhere.

That felt good.

Next stop was in a shopping area which purported to be easy to find, but we had a tough time. 

Some of the logs mentioned a "Roberto" at a nearby restaurant/bar who might have a clue, so we stopped in and I asked a waitress for Roberto.  No Roberto, but there was a Bob who owned the place. I said we were geocaching, and she nodded knowingly and said she would get him. However, after about 10 minutes he hadn’t showed up, so I figured he was busy. We gave up and moved on.

Determined to get another find, we stopped near a Dairy Queen where the cache "Dilly Dally Streak Saver" purported to keep any streak you may have going, it was that simple.  When we got out of the car and got the GPS reading, we immediately, 80 feet from the cache, knew exactly where it was.  My youngest, to whom I’d just explained Light Post Caches, put his new knowledge to work.

He signed the log and put the cache back.  Normally I wouldn’t put a picture of the cache here, but it’s apparent to me that the simplicity is the reason for it, so I’m guessing no harm done.

So we went 2 for 4 today, which was a whole lot better than last time.

I took three of the kids out on an excursion on our 1 year anniversary of finding our first cache.  Well, technically, that was the 27th, but close enough.  I drove us to a location with a number of caches, and with at least one that could hold the traveler that I picked up in Cozumel. 

We started with the closest one we came across, a small one with just a log.  We did some searching but were unable to find it.

We moved on to the nearby Ronald Reagan Park, which has a dog running area and thus the name of the cache; Barking Lot.

I’d read the hint, but didn’t give it out to the kids.  We just followed the phone/GPS, passed a slightly frozen pond (unusual for Georgia in December), and started searching.

It didn’t take long, and my daughter found it.

As per the description, a few of the items were dog-related (food dish, leashes), but there were your typical items that folks had traded in.  We signed the log, took a toy Anakin Skywalker, and left a slightly-warped bouncey ball and the traveller.

We tried a couple of other caches, but came up empty.  The first was supposed to be a simple 2-stage multi in the same park, but we were unable to come up with the first stage.

And then we tried looking at a library across the street.  A small mayo jar in a bush.  Should have been easy but we went all through the bush we thought was the place but didn’t find it.

So we went 1 for 4, but did have a good time.  It was getting dark, so we returned home.  Happy Anniversary to us!