Geocaching with "thepaytons"

My youngest son’s Cub Scout den was to go camping at a nearby state park, and I’d found one of the GA State Park caches on the website, so I planned on doing that as one of the activities while we were there.  Unfortunately, a fever took me out, and Mom went with our son to the camping trip.  What a trooper.

Upon arrival, the folks were expecting to do the geocaching, so Mom, having never actually run Blackstar on her own (though I’d loaded it on her Blackberry) called me for the coordinates, and I gave her a quick bit of instructions on how to enter them and how to use it to locate the cache.  Off they went.

It seems a short ways off from their campsite; just 8 tenths of a mile.  But walking in the direction, they soon found it was on the other side of the rather long lake.  So they got into some cars and drove over to a parking spot on the other side that seemed near where they needed to be.  Two paths curved around towards the direction of the cache so they split up.  Hilarity ensued as 2 scouts with the walkie-talkies wound up with the same group, and one scout got a bit lost.  (Fortunately, he had one of the walkie-talkies.)  My wife’s group reconvened and continued to follow the compass arrow.  Upon arrival near the location, she looked up and immediately spotted it.  With a little help from her, the other boys saw it, and the other group came over to enjoy the find.  All complaining about legs hurting from walking so much just melted away.

There were supposedly 5 trackables in there, but none were to be found, unfortunately.  Rather disappointing.  I hope they’re not being stolen.

For the third time, we found another letterbox cache nearby.  We keep managing to stumble across these when looking for other caches.

So another find for us, and the first expedition run by Mom.  Wish I could have been there, too.

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.

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.

We’re up in Dahlonega, GA this Independence Day weekend, and got some caching in this afternoon; just me and the boys.  Dahlonega was the site of a gold rush in the early 1800s and is one of a number of quaint north Georgia towns, still with a town square and shops all around it.  It also has a quite a number caches.

We’re looking to pick up a travel bug for my younger daughter to take with her on her upcoming trip to Calgary, Alberta for Bible Quizzing Internationals.  So our first stop was to the cache called “Dahlonega Travel Bug Motel”, who’s purpose is to hold just travelers.  It was located between a gas station and a hotel.

While we were looking, the hotel manager and a maintenance man came by inspecting the air conditioning units and asked what we were doing.  We gave her the info and she was a bit concerned that the location was possibly on her property, but at least, if it wasn’t was in sight of some first floor guests, who might open the drapes to find people prowling around.  As soon as we got back from this caching run, I logged the DNF and let the owner know what the manager said.  Almost immediately, he disabled the cache, and said he would check to see if it’s still there, and if so move it to a new location.

Our next stop was at the Dahlonega Taco Bell for a micro.

We did some searching, but then I looked at the web page for the cache and discovered that at least the last 5 folks who tried looking didn’t find it.  So we figured we weren’t either, and moved on.

The next one, “Booker’s Stash” was outside the Lumpkin County Library (hence the name).  In under 5 minutes, my younger boy found it and we brought it back to the van to sift through it.

There wasn’t much of interest in there, and we hadn’t brought anything to trade anyway.  So we signed the log and put it back.

Next stop, a cache called “The Five Senses #1 – Smell”, and it was certainly appropriately named.  It was outside a trash facility.  We parked the van and started looking around; initially across the street but the fence nearby just called out to me.

Sure enough, my older son managed to find it and took the bison tube back to the van.  It was a very well-waterproofed setup; a small plastic tube inside the bison tube.  We signed the log, rolled it up tightly, put it back and moved on.

We started on our way towards home base and hit two more on the way.  The first was at a McDonald’s.

A pink bison tube was there, with a log book getting rather full.  We found a spot to sign it and put it back where we found it.  On we go…

Our last stop was at a Home Depot close to our Dahlonega base.  We searched and searched, making sure to avoid the many spiders hanging around, but didn’t find the bison tube that was waiting for us.

And so we end the day going 3 and 3.

The state parks in Georgia have a Geo-Challenge where they have hidden geocaches in 42 state parks.  Each is a normal geocache but also has a stamp that you are supposed to stamp onto your Geo-Challenge Passport.  When you find a certain number of GASP (GA state park) caches, you can get different custom geocoins.  I didn’t pick up on the passport thing until after we found the one at Amicalola Falls today, but we’ll have to print out one of their passports before we go next time.

The falls itself is very beautiful, and is the highest falls east of the Mississippi.  It’s surrounded by the north Georgia mountains.

This official GASP cache is close to the Lodge, where we were going to have lunch, normally an $8.50 buffet.  But for the July 4th weekend, the price was $13 per person, which I didn’t recall from the website.  Very disappointing.  So, deciding to eat later, we went down the trail.

Along the way we found a leaf bug, and my older daughter befriended it, as she does with many a large bug.

We made our way to within GPS-accuracy distance, and upon my announcing that fact, my youngest looked down and was standing right in front of the cache.  We opened it up and looked through the contents.

We hadn’t come prepared to trade anything, so we were going to just sign the log and go.  However, there was a geocoin there, in the log, the person who dropped it off said it was trying to go to the northeast United States.  Well, in a week and a half we’re going on vacation to New York, so we couldn’t resist (and we’re hooked on geocoins anyway).

So, sorry for not dropping anything off, but we’re going to send this Oakcoin on its way.

And this was our 25th find.