The MMC had a break­fast rally to Way­nes­boro, Geor­gia. We went, ate and instead of dri­ving back with the group, we went, that’s right, geocaching.

There were four located in and around down­town, three were listed as easy and one was a dif­fi­cult, rat­ing 4 out of 5 stars. Based on our results those rat­ings were pretty much dead on.

Donna was really inter­ested in the dif­fi­cult one because we had to solve a puz­zle, which looked like fun, to get the final coor­di­nates and that was our first planned stop, but when after break­fast the group made a short drive to a local Men­non­ite bak­ery we passed right by the loca­tion of an easy one. Because it was on our way to the puz­zle one, we stopped at the Con­fed­er­ate Ceme­tery first.

Being recent con­verts and flush with excite­ment for our new endeavor we did what any other neo­phyte might, con­vert oth­ers to our way of life and man­aged to get two other cou­ples to join us down the rab­bit hole. This cache is actu­ally rated 1.5, but we had read the logs (which often con­tain spoil­ers) so we had a pretty good idea of what and where it was, so it turned into a 1. Nei­ther Donna nor I found the cache, Rita did. It was lit­er­ally, the title of this post, and all there was room for was the rolled up paper log. Because we are still novices at this we learned one of the hard and fast rules of geo­caching, bring a pen. The only per­son who had one was Rita’s hus­band Larry, but it has been trav­el­ing, unused, for sev­eral years in the pocket of the jacket he was wear­ing, so was not the best, but we skipped our names and date on the paper. After re-hiding the cache Rudy and Patti (cou­ple #2) had time con­straints, so they high­tailed it back to Augusta.

Larry & Rita had no other real plans, so they came along with us to tackle the hard one, His­toric Fob. Because of the descrip­tion we knew we needed to visit the cour­t­house, so we ignored the coor­di­nates for the park­ing and just found a spot on the street right there. There were 8 ques­tions that the answers to made up the places after the dec­i­mal point in the min­utes of the coor­di­nates. A cou­ple were head scratch­ers and one must have been inter­preted dif­fer­ently than the four of us did, but an edu­cated guess as to the mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion and we headed to the hid­ing place of the cache (right across the street from the cour­t­house.) That’s went it went from bad to worse. The GPS lead us right to one side of the park right near where the Pub­lic Works depart­ment was work­ing on a water meter or some­thing, a hole in the ground that looked like it had been there awhile. We were there awhile too look­ing and pok­ing and pok­ing and look­ing, but with no suc­cess. We were dis­ap­pointed, but shrugged it off because right there at the top of the direc­tions it men­tioned that you pos­si­bly might not find it.

There was another cache less than a quar­ter mile away, the Brown Fob, so the four us started walk­ing. We cut through an alley and with about 500 feet to go came to an empty lot and when we looked through it and across the street all four of us simul­ta­ne­ously knew exactly where to find it.

Plug­ging in the num­bers for the fourth, and last cache in Way­nes­boro, turns out it was 1.17 miles to the south of where we were stand­ing. It was a nice day, so we opted to take a walk. We walked and walked and walked and I checked the GPS, .56 miles left. We walked some more and some more and I checked the GPS and it said .53 miles left. Walk, walk, walk, .49 miles left. The group told me to stop check­ing or we’d never get there. We walked and walked and walked and we walked so far that we came across the restau­rant the Miata Club had had break­fast in. I checked the GPS and it said .36 miles, now we are get­ting closer. There was some bad news though, the direc­tional arrow was now pointed per­pen­dic­u­lar to our southerly route and it was aim­ing right at the lake the Lake­view Restau­rant sits on.

I checked the map and sure enough we in the same sit­u­a­tion Donna and I were in last week in the woods, a really long walk to get to the cache after we had already been on a really long walk. The four of us agreed the best thing to do would be turn around, walk the 3/4 mile back the cars and drive to find the the Red Fob. It turned out to be an easy find, only one u-turn required, and because it is still win­ter so the patch of woods it is hid­den in was still bar­ren of leaves.