Geocaching with "thepaytons"

With my eldest back from college, we had to do some caching.  We went over to a baseball park that both my sons have (in the past) played at.  There are a couple of multis there, but we were in a bit of a hurry (had to pick up one or two within an hour and get something to help out with supper).  So we went for the easy grabs.

And they were, especially for my eldest.  Both time, she pretty much walked right up to them.

The first was near some walking trails at one end of the park, off the trail a bit near the houses that back up to the park.

We brought along the geocoin that we’d picked up before.  I’d hoped to drop it off in Savannah, but my wife went to help get my daughter packed up rather than I.  So we decided to drop it off here and let someone else send it on its way.

Not much in the cache itself, so we just signed the log and dropped off the coin.

On to the other cache, on the other side of the park where the jogging trails are.  Once again, my oldest basically just walked into it.  Her geocaching radar was really working.

We found what looked like a face in a tree while doing our hunting.

We found the micro, but forgot to bring our own pen, so this photographic evidence will have to suffice.

So endeth another fine day of caching.

With the rest of the family still out of town (and our daughter winning a place on our denomination’s Bible Quizzing Team for Internationals!), we set out in the afternoon to hit 3 caches.  The first one we would hit would make #20.

However, at the first one we went to we came up empty handed.  Even with the hint, we were still unable to make the find.  Ironically, the difficulty for this was the lowest of the three we set out to find, and we did find the other two.  (Ah, it’s all subjective anyway.)

The second option was at a gas station, and the chance for discovery was rather high, this being on a busy street.  But there weren’t too many folks filling up, so not too bad.  At first we thought this was going to be a standard LPC (Lamp Post Cache, typically underneath the skirt that protects the bolts).  Without being too spoiler-y, technically it wasn’t, but in one sense it was.

We got the log and headed back to the car to sign it.

We tried to be sneaky getting it back, making my son the distraction by appearing to take a picture of me.  Can’t post it here, because I was oh-so-slyly pointing to where the cache was (for future reference). 

Thus, we had found our 20th cache.

On to our third attempt of the day, off the parking lot of a nearby church.  This was a bit more difficult.  It’s near a fence, but it appears this is an old fence that, at this point, doesn’t really separate anything.  It stops and starts in an area of overgrowth, so getting to and around it was a bit of a challenge. 

The description said to search high, so we did.

I went closer to where my son was searching, looked up, and I was in just the right spot to see it.  Back to the car for the signing of the log.

We returned it to its place (I had to do it to ensure it was as high as it was originally) and we came home having done an overall successful cache run.

With the whole family out of town but my youngest son and I, I decided to do some special geocaching with him.  (Seems that’s what happens when he winds up here with no siblings.)  We had been sitting for three weeks on a trackable that we picked up on Spring Break in Florida, so it was time to move it along.  (I made up for this by taking 2 pictures of it next to bodies of water near us, as it asked.)  So I found a regular cache (i.e. not a small or micro) near us and we headed out.

The place is a nice wooded area next to a Lutheran church, along a path that they created into it.  I assume that someone from the church knows it’s there, so we parked near the woods and walked on in.  Again, I was without a regular camera so a Blackberry in the dusk was all I had, and thus the pictures aren’t all that good.

I availed myself of the hint, but once we followed the arrow, it really wasn’t necessary.

A very swag-rich find, including 2 trackables.

We dropped off our Floridian guest and picked up a German racing coin.

The intent of the coin is to hit as many caches as it can, and travel as great a distance as possible.  I have to go start the pack-up process for my daughter at college, so I’ll bring it with me there to put a few miles on it.

We signed the log, closed it, and hid it (slightly) better than we found it.  See you later, travel bug!

We went to Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park today, and figured we’d look up a close-by cache on our Blackberries when we got there, rather that trying to guess where we might stop.  Our first order of business was taking a picture of the travel bug in our possession.  It wants to be photographed near lakes or reservoirs, so we got a shot of it by the Stone Mountain Park lagoon.

The nearby multi-stage cache said in its description that you should block out 3-4 hours to find all the stages.  Well, we didn’t have that kind of time, so we found one within a short driving distance in the park, at the old Grist Mill.

We found what was the likely drop zone and started hunting.  At one point, I thought I’d found it, but when we checked inside, we found this laminated piece of paper:

Sorry, that’s the best I could do for something this small and in the dusk light.  It says, "Sorry, This is not the cache.  Try again."  Thing is, this was a very cleverly camouflaged cache, and to be a decoy got a big chuckle out of me. 

But while it confirmed that we were in the right area, we never did find the actual cache.  There had been some recent renovations to the Grist Mill and the surrounding area, so I’m hoping it wasn’t removed in that.  The log shows that someone found it just 4 days ago, so perhaps this difficulty 2 cache was just to clever for us.  A DNF, for now.

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?