Geocaching with "thepaytons"

I went with one of my daughters to visit Mercer University as a potential place for her to go to college. We arrive in Macon from Atlanta in rather good time, and we had an hour to kill. Of course, geocaching came to mind, and I was eager to try out the geocaching app on my new Android phone (c:geo).

There are 2 on or very near the campus. One is a difficulty 4 (though the description said it had, at one point, been a difficulty 5) and one is a virtual. We tried the physical cache first, having never tried one this difficult before. Having read how hard some 5s are, I was wondering if we’d be successful, even if it since had been downgraded to 4. The logs said that it had been rated easier, but then increased as many folks could not find it. The cache is called “IVP but not IPV”. The GPS brought us to Ingleside Village Pizza (“IVP”), and the description told us it was not “in plain view” (“IPV”). It also noted that the cache owner had not see this particular hiding place type before, so the obvious searching of bushes felt unneeded.

I don’t want to give away too much, so I’ll say this; looking at this spot suggested a particular hiding place to us (but not the green box, because the description specifically said it’s not associated with that). We searched for about 10 minutes, and almost left, but just before doing so, my daughter tried one more place and it turned out to be the right spot. While there were few muggles around, we hurried off back to the car to sign the log.

The virtual cache is called “Jesse the Baptist”. Mercer University is a Baptist university started by Jesse Mercer, and there is a bench with a bronze Jesse on campus. Surrounding the bench is a circle of stones with different words of inspiration he said, and to get credit for the virtual you had to either e-mail the cache owner a picture or one of the thoughts.

We walked through the campus on the way there and enjoyed the beauty of this wonderful spring day (though it started, as we found out, with a 6am tornado warning from strong storms that moved through the night before).

And then, there was Jesse.

A little later, we watched a video at the opening session for the campus visit, which noted that freshmen rub Jesse’s head for luck, and then the graduation seniors do, as they file in for commencement.

We took a picture by one of the words of inspiration, and went to register for the campus visitation day. A very nice start to the day.

When we went out to do the searching, we did not realize we were on this particular milestone. We tried again to look for stage 4 of the old stand-by, the 5-stage-multi greenway trail near us. We’d gotten a bit of a hint that it was on the ground (as opposed to up in a tree), but that didn’t help enough.

However, a new greenway trail on the other side of the town was recently completed, and two caches were placed at the two ends (it forks). We went to find one of them.

The GPS gave me some bad information right at the start. It seemed like no matter where we were, the target was 50 feet away. After some frustrating clambering in the woods, we noticed that the distance got smaller the closer we got to where we were entered. We got to the zone and I located it in about 20 seconds.

Don’t have any real good pictures of the find, because we didn’t realize the significance of the find. And we didn’t bring a pen to sign the log. The kids bike there often, so they may come back later and sign it.

But we made it to 50 today!