Geocaching with "thepaytons"

Indeed, there was more searching than finding, but it actually did pay off in the end, literally.

As we were touring historic downtown Savannah, we took a couple of breaks to see if we could find something.  We took a few shots at it, but came up empty.

Later that evening, we visited my daughter’s college.  I’d suggested she go caching on her own while she was away this year, but it didn’t happen.  So while we were there, we decided to chase one down, a multi-stage in nearby woods on the college property.  This area has some walking/jogging trails that my daughter was unaware of, so she got introduced to this wonderful area via caching.

The first two stages were business-card-sized laminated paper attached to trees.  As we found them, we punched in the new coordinates and continued on.

On the way, my youngest son saw a hole in a tree that looked like a good hiding place, and even though we weren’t near the coordinates, he took a peek in there anyway.  And what do you know, there was a cache there, but it was another letterbox, similar to one we’d found (again, accidentally) previously.

As we were looking for the third and final stage, my kids were bushwhacking through off the trail towards the coordinates.  My wife and I continued down the trail, and found that it turned toward the general area of target.  And just slightly off the trail, she, who isn’t really into the whole geocaching thing but is very encouraging of the hobby, found a place that seemed like a good hiding place, and got her first find.

We left our signature boondoggle and took a Chick-Fil-A coupon.

It was only good for a specific, local Chick-Fil-A location, and was expired, but we thought we’d give it a try at supper time.  Sure enough, they took it, and I described how we found it to the girl at the register.  I thought perhaps the store manager might know about geocaching, since the coupon would have had to have come from him, but I didn’t get a chance to see him.  Ah well. 

Still, who says geocaching doesn’t pay?

Fortunately you don’t have to go crawling around in a sewer to find this one.  There are a few rainwater drains and pipes underneath the roads at this corner, however, which all suggested hiding places. 

With his older siblings otherwise occupied (one at college, one visiting a college and one washing cars as a fund raiser), I took my youngest on a hunt of his own.  Our first finds were without him around because, during that part of Christmas vacation, he was staying at the grandparents place nearby where his NY cousins were staying.  So I thought I’d give him a hunt of his own.

I was trying to use my Blackberry as both GPS and camera, so I’d get a general idea of distance, switch to camera, then back to the GPS, and realize we were still a bit off from ground zero.  So we were looking all over the place at the start.

But we finally got our bearings, and found the "sewer" it was talking about.  Actually a telephone cable access point.

He found the small electrical-tape-covered cylinder, but when we took the cap off the log book was soaked.  So we just took pictures to record, for ourselves, the find.

We dutifully rolled it back up and put it back in its place.  We then logged the find on the website.  Good job for the kiddo!

And one of them was accidental!

We took a family trip to McDaniel Farm Park in Duluth, GA today.  My wife wanted to see if it would be a good place for a field trip for her class of kids reading Little House on the Prairie, and there were 4 caches mentioned on the map at geocaching.com.  We parked the car and took in some of the exhibits before we headed out for some hunting.  (Rain was supposed to be coming in around 3pm, so we had — supposedly — over 2 hours before that happened.)

The cache closest to us was "Old McDaniel Had a Farm", and was slightly off the beaten track.

But once we narrowed down the search area, my youngest made his first find.

The cache was a farm themed one, meaning it had started with farming stuff, though it’s been a while so the items in there weren’t all that farm related.  But we helped out with that, leaving a seed packet and taking a foldable ‘frisbee’.

We followed our GPS to the next location, but while we were still apparently 200 feet from the cache, my oldest found something. 

Turned out it was our first letterbox find.  However, this wasn’t listed on the web site, so our stumbling across it was just that.  For this kind of cache, you bring a signature stamp along with you, stamp it in the log, and take the stamp from the box and make an impression in a log you bring along.  The stamp you see above, and there were quite a few in the log.

We left a note in the log to the effect of "sorry we didn’t have a stamp, but we found this by accident."  Very interesting, indeed.

A few minutes later, we did find our intended cache, titled "Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice".  As you may tell by the title, it was supposed to be a girls themed cache, but again trading had made it more generic.  In keeping with the theme, we left a bottle of nail polish, and took a camo bracelet (more a guy thing).  The log book was full, so we signed the back cover.

The rain started to come in quite a bit earlier than predicted, on and off, so we picked up the pace a bit.  The next one was near enough, with the GPS suggesting it was along side a nearby creek.

My younger daughter found this plastic peanut butter jar.  The contents looked a bit meager, so we just left a boondoggle without taking anything, and signed the damp log book.

For the final cache of the day, the kids went off on their own while us older folks took a rest.  They had a tough time finding it as the GPS kept throwing them all over the place.  But they finally found this cleverly concealed cache.  (And they took a camera with them.)

For this cache they took nothing and left nothing, since our bag of goodies that we brought along had been misplaced along the way, but they did sign the log.  They were impressed with a sticker that someone had put in a log with their geocaching info.

So a personal best for a day of caching.  After this, even the kids were tired out.  🙂

We started this afternoon trying to find a cache we were unable to locate before.  This time, the ball field was populated with a girls’ softball team practicing in the low-40-degree weather. 

As before, still didn’t find it.  Not for want of trying, though.  (No pictures this time.)

We decided to go for an actual find, and looked to see other caches nearby.  There is one near an historic site in Lilburn; the Wynne-Russell house.

We did some searching in the back of the house, as that’s where our GPS pointed us.

Finally, we looked at the hint on the web page for the cache.  Turns out that it was more a "precise location" than a hint.  Upon reading it, my son, who was within eyeshot of it, turned his head and found it.  Hence my calling it half a find.

Since this was such an easy find, the kids wanted something a bit more challenging, so off we went.

This next cache is called "Publix Enemy Vanquished", as it is hidden on the site of an Ingles grocery store that the across-the-street Publix put out of business.  It’s now a church, but on this Saturday afternoon it was empty.

We started looking though some bushes in the parking lot, but upon further consultation with the Blackberry GPS, we realized it was elsewhere.  (No spoiler.)

This particular cache has a unique camouflage to it that I looked right at and passed by.  My son, upon looking at it, notice that a plastic bag was sticking out and figured that was suspicious.  Sure enough that was it.  We took it back to the car to go through.

My daughter made the boondoggle in the picture, which is what we left.  We’ considering making those our "signature" drops. 

The log papers were all quite soggy, but someone had put a dry page in which we signed. 

We took a Jillian’s sports bar game token.

And actually, we accidentally took that little blue heart shown in the previous picture because it dropped into my car’s cup holder, after which I put my Blackberry on top of it.  On the back was written "Rexnest", which is a user name on Geocaching.com.  I’ll let them know we have it.

So a good find and a half today. 

The very first cache we tried to find was the difficulty 3 Camp Creek Greenway Trail cache.  Yeah, starting geocaching with a difficult multi was probably not the best way to get into it, but since the kids new the greenway so well, I thought it would be fun.

We went back to search for stage 3.  This was actually our second shot at it (didn’t take pictures of the first shot, which included my wife’s sister, her husband, and their 2 boys).  The stage is somewhere in a area of bamboo along the greenway.  Yeah, I didn’t think there was bamboo in Georgia, either.

Following a clue that the cache hider, geomuse, gave us, we continue our search.  Sometimes we were looking inside things.

Sometime we were looking at the bamboo from the side away from the trail.

But  we still didn’t find it.  I found a patch of ground that was naturally shielded, visually, from the trail.  I scoured that area but came up empty.  So we went back to geomuse for yet another clue.  (My daughter didn’t want to ask, but my boys were in agreement that we needed some help.)