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.

I was going to Montreal on business so I just had to get our first find outside the US. With this in mind, I had pulled out a geocoin that was in our cache as well as prepare one of ours to set on its way. I pulled up the map on geocaching.com and found that the nearest cache to the client’s preferred hotel that could hold a geocoin was a short drive away on a college campus. Sounded good

Except that when I went to book the room, they were filled up for 2 of the nights I was going to be there. The backup plan was to stay at a hotel where other folks from my company were staying doing work for another client. I booked the room first and then looked for coin-friendly cache.

Right across the street. Amazing.

Today I came back to the hotel and started looking.  Seems that whenever I go caching while on business, I wind up in an area that has lots of trash.  The location of the cache I found in Cleveland was near a dumpster, and trash was all around.  In this case, the trash was in what the cache hider referred to as a beaver den.  (Well, "la hutte du castor".  This is Montreal.)  And indeed once you approached it and walked into the bush, it did remind one of a beaver den.

But for the trash, this would be a fantastic fort for kids. 

I did some looking around, poking a stick at the stuff on the ground.  I got tired of picking through trash, so I thought I’d come back the next day.  However, it started to rain a little, and this huge bush was actually good shelter from the rain.  I decided to keep hunting until it let up.  Good thing I did.  Within 60 seconds, I found the cache.

As is my habit, I forgot to bring a pen, so I couldn’t sign the log this time, but I’ll come back tomorrow to fix that. 

Not much in the cache; a golf ball and a pencil eraser.  But I dropped off the two travel bugs I came with;  RedIrishLilly’s First Geocoin and Just Shoot Me.

Have a good trip!

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.