Geocaching with "thepaytons"

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.

One of our geocoins took a 2,400 mile trip recently, from Georgia to Oregon. "Georgia (Appalachian Trail) On My Mind" was brought to a geocaching event in a town called Rogue River, and from there has been roaming around that state a bit. It’s trying to go to the country of Georgia, so hopefully someone can get it off this continent sometime in the future.

The other coin, "Just Shoot Me", which wants to get pictures of it taken and uploaded to the site, has apparently gone missing. It’s last known location was a cache near Montreal, Quebec, but that was 7 months ago, and, while other cachers have found that cache, no one has recorded picking up the coin (nor the one that I had also brought up to Canada on a business trip; both coins got moved and both have stopped). I’ve registered this geocoin with the site "tb-rescue.com" which allows people to register apparently lost (or non-moving) travel bugs. Others choose an area in which to get alerts for when a travel bug needs to be moved. We did get one group who said that, last March, they were going to try to locate the cache and rescue the coin, but no word since then. Ah well, all part of the game. These things get lost.

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.

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!