Rye Patch

We had big plans to go geo­caching this morn­ing, but they fell through when we opted to sleep in and just stick around the house. We did go out later with a friend and grabbed 2 caches that were real close by, one in Hopeland Gar­dens (where the photo was taken) and one in the Aiken County Museum.

Right now Donna is in the other room on the lap­top mak­ing big plans to go caching tomor­row morn­ing. We’ll see how that goes, it is sup­posed to be 22° at sunrise.

Nature Trail in Boyd Pond Park

After count­less miles and count­less hours of criss­cross­ing the state of South Car­olina find­ing a geo­cache in each and every county we took a short 1/2 mile hike in Boyd Pond Park, which is less than 7 miles from home, to grab the Challenge’s bonus cache. We also found 4 oth­ers and DNF’d one while we were out & about.

You know, if we were smart, we would start seri­ously work­ing on the Geor­gia DeLorme Chal­lenge (we have 14 of 60 already) and Geor­gia County Chal­lenge (16 of 159) as we do the 42 state parks…

Tal­lu­lah Gorge State Park Sus­pen­sion Bridge

It’s another day, so here’s the story:

When we arrived at Tal­lu­lah State Park I selected the cache on the GPSr and on the PDA (right here is where the pay­ing atten­tion part was needed.) I read the descrip­tion on the PDA and it said the cache was acces­si­ble from the North Rim Trail and was an easy .25 mile hike. We decided to head to the oppo­site end of the trail first to view the gorge from Inspi­ra­tion Point and then work our way back­ward stop­ping at each over­look to oooh and aaah before mak­ing the find. The place was full of peo­ple being as it was Sun­day and the leaves are chang­ing, so we were wor­ried about find­ing the cache with all these mug­gles about, but were con­fi­dent we would find it, because after all it was an ammo can, how could we miss.

We stopped at a cou­ple places and I took a few pic­tures, I’m sure a pho­tog­ra­pher from National Geo­graphic could accu­rately cap­ture the mag­ni­tude of the gorge, but I couldn’t really get it. As we walked along the trail towards over­looks 3 and above the GPSr started point­ing to the left directly into the gorge. It was only read­ing a hun­dred and some­thing feet so it wasn’t telling me the cache was in the mid­dle of the gorge, but it was right off this north rim trail. The only way we could go that direc­tion was to head down towards the sus­pen­sion bridge that con­nects the north rim to the south rim. At the spot where the “trail” turns to go down the gorge there is a sign stat­ing that only the phys­i­cally fit should pass this point and if you go down the 1,099 steps to the bridge, remem­ber that you have to come back up them to go home. I say trail, but it is really noth­ing more than metal treaded stairs with a half dozen short wooden land­ings enclosed by a four foot high rail­ing on both sides to keep you from wandering.

Arriv­ing at the level of the bridge the GPSr was read­ing 70′ and point­ing towards the end of the bridge. We won­dered where you could hide an ammo can there. As we got closer the “trail” split and one way led under the bridge. Ah Ha! It was a small land­ing giv­ing you a view of the under­side of the bridge. You really can’t get off of the “trail”, so the only place the cache could have been was right under the bridge near where the beams were anchored into the rock or under­neath the bench. There wasn’t an ammo can in either spot. I looked at the GPSr and it was now point­ing 75′ across the gorge, maybe it is on the other side after all. When we reached the other side, the GPSr was now point­ing back towards the side we just came from, 135′ away. The tree cover and being 800 feet down in a canyon was wreak­ing havoc with satel­lite recep­tion. We walked back over to the north side thor­oughly dis­gusted. Donna read some of the past logs and no one was com­plain­ing about how hard it was to find. When she read one that said, “Clever hide,” we rethought our search para­me­ters, maybe the ammo can was tied to a rope and dan­gling from the walk­way some where. We looked all along both sides of the “trail” and found no sign of rope, string or chains. Time to give up.

All the while we climbed those 1,099 steps we were think­ing to our­selves (mainly because we didn’t have the breath to waste on the uphill slog) that they surely didn’t expect any­one to climb over the rail­ings to search for the cache and where did they come off with that .25 mile easy hike thing.

An hour or so later when we ran into some other cachers at Tuga­loo State park and they told us the peo­ple they know who have found the Tal­lu­lah Gorge cache described it as being easy and right off the trail, just as the descrip­tion out­lined. An idea started to form in my pea sized brain. When we got back to the car after find­ing this cache I had the eureka moment about that ear­lier State Park miss — I had the wrong cache loaded into the GPSr while read­ing the cor­rect descrip­tion on the PDA.

Because we not only had the State Park caches loaded, but also 40 or so along our intended route, I had inad­ver­tently picked up the coor­di­nates for an Earth Cache that was in the park, not the cache that was part of the Geo-Challenge. Doh! (insert sound of Homer Simp­son style head slap here.) Because I didn’t read the require­ments for the earth cache while we were on site we didn’t have the required knowl­edge to “find” that one either, thereby chalk­ing up two DNFs simultaneously.*

* I didn’t log them as DNFs on gecaching.com though because I had the coor­di­nates loaded of some­thing that didn’t have a actual con­tainer not to find, so how could I have not found it.

This year is the 10th anniver­sary of geo­caching and as a way of celebrating:

The geo­caching com­mu­nity is attempt­ing to break the record for num­ber of accounts that logged caches in a sin­gle day. Cur­rently that num­ber stands at 56,654. Even one log on 10–10-10 counts since we are tal­ly­ing how many accounts log a cache, rather than the num­ber of caches logged.

There were gobs of events around the world and prob­a­bly one or two locally to help get folks out caching and log­ging. Donna and I planned to do a lit­tle caching today, in the man­ner in which we usu­ally cache, by our­selves. But after yesterday’s trip we decided to scratch our grandiose plans of find­ing 10 caches on 10/10/10 and fig­ured we would just go get one. We had no clue which one, but wanted some­thing close by.

Last night as I sat in front of the PC log­ging yesterday’s geo­caching adven­tures an email alert came in of a new cache. I opened it up expect­ing to that it was 18 or 19miles away in Augusta, it wasn’t, it was .5 miles away. After briefly toy­ing with the idea of try­ing to be the First To Find, we opted to use this cache as our 1 for ten-ten-ten.

We slept in a lit­tle this morn­ing and had pan­cakes for break­fast. I checked the cache and sure enough, a cou­ple of folks claimed the first to find last night at 9:20,so we grabbed the GPS on our way out to do some gro­cery shop­ping, think­ing that we would get the Kiss­ing Your Sis­ter prize of Sec­ond To Find. We arrived at ground zero and started to search around. I had left the PDA at home so we had no idea what size con­tainer we were look­ing for, nor any clues if avail­able. So we only gave a half-hearted 5 minute hunt before leav­ing empty handed.

Well, the record attempt require­ments didn’t say any­thing about finds, just logs, so a DNF was just as good.

On Sun­day evening the cache owner of the Bread Crumb Series received 3 emails from me. The first one was was sent using the con­tact form on geocaching.com to let him know that we couldn’t make out the coor­di­nate snip­pet in #3:

My wife and I re-did the Bread Crumb Series this morn­ing (expla­na­tion com­ing via a log later) and the coords on #3 are totally unread­able, so all we have for the North Augusta final are:
N33° _ _.006
W081° _ _.892
Could you fill us in on what the cor­rect min­utes are?

Thanks, Brian

P.S. The black paint on the #3 con­tainer is flak­ing off in your hands when you hold it. #6 was full of water, but the log was OK in its bag­gie. We cleaned out the the soggy stuff and dried off the unaf­fected items.

The next one he would have got would have been the auto­matic email gen­er­ated as a cache owner when ever any­one logs a Found or DNF on one of his caches. This is what I wrote in the log for the Green­wood final:

We did the bread crumb series in Novem­ber and when we got to the final loca­tion in Green­wood it was mug­gle city. We came back 2 months later (New Years Day actu­ally), had the place to our­selves and made the find. Didn’t know it had a GC num­ber that could be logged on geocaching.com. We thought that was kind of weird, but we were new enough to geo­caching that we fig­ured some­times that hap­pens with these bonus caches. After all it is not about the num­bers, it is about the hunt. Right?;)

Last week, while research­ing caches to do along the North Augusta Green­way, I found one at the far end from where we have been look­ing called, End of the trail ‘North Augusta’, and right there in the descrip­tion it said: “This is the North Augusta end cache for my bread crumbs series # 1–6. You need the clues from each of the con­tain­ers in that series to hunt this cache and the one in Greenwood.”

HUH!?!? So I searched in Green­wood for some­thing called “End of the trail” and sure enough there is the other one.…you do get credit for find­ing the final caches in the Bread Crumb series. We’ve been robbed! We have more finds than we thunk!

So today, because we had tossed out the coor­di­nates for this hide (hav­ing already found it), we headed to Green­wood re find­ing all 6 of the Bread Crumb series on our way. When we arrived at GZ we had the place to our­selves again and after a spi­der web bust­ing walk, made the grab for the sec­ond time in 6 months. Opened it up expect­ing to look back and see our siggy, but a new log sheet was started in Feb­ru­ary. With no proof we had actu­ally been here back in Jan­u­ary, I signed the new one with today’s date. Which, when you think about it, works out OK because now I can log it online today as well.

After I logged the find, I used the con­tact form again to make a cou­ple sug­ges­tions that might be help­ful to peo­ple like me in find­ing out the names of the two final caches:

Maybe it is just us because we were are sort of new when we first ran into the Bread Crumbs, but we didn’t know that the two finals for the series had GC num­bers and were log­gable on geocaching.com.

It might be help­ful if you plugged them (with name & GC#) in the descrip­tions of the 6 bread crumbs caches like you do for your other caches along the way.

I don’t know if you can rename an already pub­lished cache, but it would help them turn up in a key­word search on geocaching.com if you could put the words “Bread Crumb” in between “End of” & “Trail…” in the titles.

I’m not sure which one, or if it was a comb­n­i­na­tion of all three, but I pierced someone’s thin skin. Within an hour I received this scathing stream of con­cious­ness email back from the cache owner:

well I am sorry my bread crumb finals were not to your approval. how ever if you read the whole dis­crip­tion in #‘s 1–6 they tell of the two end caches BY NAME.And since you are the only one that has com­plained of the name and that you could not fig­ure out the bonus caches then I will have to con­clude that it might be you. I’m sorry if this comes off alit­tle abra­sive but I have already had a big mouth cacher that did not approve of my final con­tain­ers. And I am going to say the same thing to you I said to him. I paid for all of the items for these caches as well as the means to put them out from NA to Green­wood, I don’t remem­ber any­one else help­ing me with either of those.To that end I am not going to rename my caches and fur­ther more not read­ing the cache descrip­tions is not my fault as well. I have 49 hides as of right now which 48 are active. I put these caches out to fur­ther the sport and for cachers like you. I don’t do it for my benifit. So yes I do take it per­sonal when some­one has a com­plaint. If you read any log that I have ever wrote you will not find any­thing in them that I have said that would be dis­re­spect­ful. I have done some caches that were great and some that I thought really sucked but I would never ever post that nor would I ever tell the cache owner of it. I have 620 finds I see you have 400 plus, that is enough finds under your belt to have a damn good grasp on how this game works. So please read the cache pages before you com­plain to me about one of my caches. And again I appol­o­gise if this offends you but I take my caching very seri­ous. If you need the coords to an end cache please fill free to email me again but it looks like you got it fig­ured out.….…kaboyd

WOW! He tells me three times that the final caches are there in his Bread Crumb descrip­tions, but I’m bet­ting he hasn’t looked in a while, ’cause both Donna and I have read all 6 cache descrip­tions mul­ti­ple times and there is noth­ing there. Maybe they were in the very begin­ning and he edited the descrip­tions and some­how dropped any men­tion or he is think­ing of his other series, Cacher’s Dash which does men­tion the final by name. Rather than respond in kind and counter his dia­tribe point by point, I decided to try my polite best and replied back with this:

kaboyd,

The trou­ble with elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion is that you can­not see the expres­sion on a person’s face, nor hear the inflic­tion of their voice and it is some­times easy to mis­in­ter­pret what is being said. I am sorry if any­thing I wrote via email or posted in the log for the Green­wood final upset you in any way.

I never meant to imply that I was unhappy with the series, *or* the final caches. As a mat­ter of fact we think the Bread Crumb Series is one of the top series in the area. Each hide is well thought out, evenly spaced mileage-wise with nice spots for park­ing nearby. The caches are just far enough into the woods so you wouldn’t be seen while you hunt them and with the con­tain­ers being the same, you know just what you are look­ing for. As a bonus the route is a 2-lane road through almost entirely unde­vel­oped land, mak­ing for a very enjoy­able drive.

My only com­plaint was that I didn’t know the finals were actual caches with CG num­bers on geocahing.com. I re read each descrip­tion in full this morn­ing and while the finals are men­tioned, no names or GC num­bers are given. Here is a direct copy of the descriptions:

This is a small lock type con­tainer camo painted that con­tains a log book and a pen. It is big enough for some small trade items. These caches are in the woods so be careful.

I designed the Bread Crumbs series #1–6 to lead cachers from North Augusta to Green­wood or Green­wood to North Augusta. In either loca­tion there are many very good caches that you can goto once you have reached which ever city you are head­ing for. On each con­tainer you will find clues for two fin­ish­ing caches. One is in North Augusta the other is in Green­wood. you must com­plete the series # 1–6 in order to find either final cache. Also don’t for­get my other two caches that i have along this route. One is “In the mid­dle of nowhere”(GC1MH7R) the other is “Cachers Dash # 1″(GC1N1GB) which is another series of caches i have that leads you to a 5 stage multi cache. Good luck.…kaboyd

As you can see, the only 2 cache names given are for the two other caches you have along the same route, “In the mid­dle of nowhere” & “Cachers Dash #1″ which is why I sug­gested adding the series final’s name & GC# in the descriptions.

Also, if you would, please email back the snip­pet of coor­di­nates for the North Augusta final that are in bread crumbs #3, as they were to faded for us to read.

Thanks
Brian and Donna Bog­a­r­dus
BTR & D2!

It has been over 24 hours since my last email and I haven’t got­ten any­thing back from him, not even the coor­di­nates for the North Augusta final. I worked out sev­eral pos­si­ble com­bi­na­tions of whole min­utes to com­bine with what I do know about the coor­di­nates and plot­ted them on a Google Map and think I have a good idea where the final is. We’ll prob­a­bly head over and hunt it this week­end (like Donna wanted all along.)

While wait­ing on the meet up with the MMC for break­fast yes­ter­day and the trip to Tren­ton to be in the Ridge Peach Fes­ti­val Parade we thought we would snag a nearby cache. Because this was the only cache we were going to do that day we had brought just the GPSr and the old Pocket PC. Wouldn’t you know it the bat­ter­ies were dead in the GPSr. Being to cheap to go to the nearby gas sta­tion and pay for some AAs we used our geosense and the clue from the notes on the iPAq to come up with the find.

This morn­ing we headed over to North Augusta again with the express pur­pose of geo­caching along the Gree­neway again, so we brought the whole kit (includ­ing loads of fresh bat­ter­ies.) I even turned on the GPSr before we left home. So wouldn’t you know it, when we got over to NA and started look­ing for caches the iPaq we use for notes wouldn’t turn on. An attempt at reboot was no help, some­time between yes­ter­day and today its bat­tery had run down! We attempted 4 caches by using just the ±20′ coords from the GPSr and our geosenses and came up with 2. Not bad, but not Jedi Mas­ter mate­r­ial yet.

We grabbed a cache on the way home from din­ner out in Augusta on Fri­day. We got a find and removed one of our DNFs. We didn’t find this one a while back, but we weren’t the only ones, the con­tainer had gone miss­ing. The owner has since replaced it and we found it.

Sat­ur­day we got up early and headed north and east with the goal of fin­ish­ing up our SC Chal­lenges in that part of the state. One of the coun­ties we needed was Chester­field which is where Cousin Lau­rie resides, so instead of our typ­i­cal break­fast at Cracker Bar­rel meets in Flo­rence, we did a lunch at Sub­way in her home town of Chester­field. She even joined us on a caching expe­di­tion behind the town’s high school. We were gone for almost exactly 12 hours, cov­ered a touch over 400 miles and got to check off the 3 coun­ties and 4 DeLorme pages that we needed with the 11 caches we found.

After yes­ter­day we were at 392 total. We needed to get just 8 to get to the next mile­stone and there were 8 rel­a­tively fresh caches along the bike lane they added along side the new I-520 sec­tion in North Augusta. Seemed like some­body was try­ing to tell us some­thing. At first we tried to resist, but by after lunch the pull was too strong. We parked at the DMV and started along the trail. Donna’s idea was to walk to the fur­thest cache and work our way back (this strat­egy worked well yes­ter­day when we went all the way north and east before work­ing our way back home.) And that is almost exactly what we did, the pent up desire to do some­thing caused us to pick up #2 before walk­ing the whole way. We found all eight giv­ing us exactly 400 finds. Turns out there was a cache right there behind the DMV build­ing where we had parked, oh what the heck, might as well start on the next hun­dred, plus 401 is a prime num­ber. By the time we were done we had walked 4.7 miles.

We are fast approach­ing the end of year one of look­ing for tup­per­ware using satel­lites. Our first find was called Up Sand Creek in Hitch­cock Woods on Feb­ru­ary 15th and since then we have found another 312. The other day when we were talk­ing about this mile­stone I fool­ishly said, “Hey, why don’t we try and get to 365 caches by then so we can fin­ish up the year aver­ag­ing one a day.”

Right now we are aver­ag­ing .95 caches found per day, so it sounds like we should have an easy time of it. Not nec­es­sar­ily so. There are only 25 caching days left until the 15th and we need 52 to reach the goal, that means we would need to aver­age a hair over 2 a day until then, or more than twice our aver­age so far. Con­sid­er­ing we mostly cache on week­ends and there are only 4 of those left, we will need to find an aver­age of 13 on each of those Sat­ur­days and Sun­days. Our best week­end ever was in August with 14.

The goal is not impos­si­ble to reach though, we have had 2 days with 11 finds and one with 10, so we just have to get busy and hope for nice week­end weather until then.

After almost 4 months, the men­tal anguish of the Great Hitch­cock Woods Cache Purge of ’09 has sub­sided, so we are going to place a cache in the field. We have done sev­eral of these types of caches, i.e. find a patch of woods behind a shop­ping cen­ter and hide some­thing, both here and else­where and fig­ure it looks easy enough. We spot­ted a great place the other day and plan on plac­ing it this weekend.

We also have 2 reg­u­lar sized Lock-N-Lock caches that need homes, plus a cou­ple of the pre­vi­ous hides, because of con­tainer size, that are going to need much big­ger wooded areas to be reused.

After 3 weeks of not geo­caching, we ven­tured out of the house this morn­ing with GPSr in hand. A cou­ple hours later we had found 4 (Donna 3, Brian 1) and missed two. One of the ones we missed was one we missed before, but that was because the sec­ond and final stage was MIA. It was just replaced about a week ago and I don’t know if we were the first to try and retrieve it, nobody had logged a find or a DNF, but when we plugged in the coords it was point­ing about 40′ out­side the park. Didn’t seem right, so we went back to the first stage again to check if we had the right num­bers. Yep.

Emailed the cache owner and she said it was halfway between stage 1 and where stage 2 was before and it def­i­nitely was inside the park. She said she would check on it after the hol­i­days when she gets back from Florida. But the seed of doubt has been planted, we are going to have to go back and triple check to make sure we got the final stage coor­di­nates right.

We are at 291 finds and have a goal of mak­ing it to 300 by years end. Shouldn’t be too hard as long as the Christ­mas week­end weather isn’t too rainy.

We looked for 15 caches over the three days from Fri­day night to Sun­day after­noon and found 8 bring­ing our total to 237 finds since 2/15/9. We missed 7 bring­ing our DNF total to 46 (which reminds me, I need to update the In Depth Sta­tis­tics page.) Here are the logs from our most inter­est­ing misses:

Fri­day
“I Spy” #6 ~ A Foun­tain
We were on our way to the coast for the week­end and mapped out a few caches for along the way. Turns out around 5 PM on a Fri­day is a fairly busy time in this small town. As I was tak­ing pic­tures of the sur­round­ings and the wife was hold­ing the GPSr let­ting it set­tle, an older model GM car pulled in abruptly near us and a gen­tle­man hopped out.

Ges­tur­ing wildly as he approached and try­ing to get out a story about how he was stranded in Willis­ton and had fam­ily in Aiken or vice versa (I think, his back coun­try south­ern drawl was barely coher­ent) and could we help him out. I said, “Oh, we don’t carry cash.” And he tried his plea again. This time my wife pointed across the street towards a busy park­ing lot and said, “Why don’t you try over there?” He replied, “I don’t know any­body over there.” To which my wife responded, “You don’t know us either.” This logic so stunned him that he walked back to his car mut­ter­ing and he drove over to the men­tioned park­ing lot.

We took this oppor­tu­nity to high­tail it east out of town.

Sat­ur­day
Mitchel­lville Beach Park
We got to Stage 1, wrote down the num­bers we needed and headed off bliss­fully fol­low­ing the arrow on the GPSr to Stage 2 pass­ing a cou­ple and their two dogs look­ing for shells on the way.

When we got about 60 feet away from Stage 2 the arrow pointed to the Pub­lic Use/CIA object men­tioned in the descrip­tion, but it was per­pen­dic­u­lar to our path and while we could see the object in ques­tion, we couldn’t get there from where we were.

So we turned around headed back the way we came, pass­ing Stage 1 again and also the dog cou­ple who still had there heads down look­ing, mak­ing a bee­line for Stage 2.

Solv­ing for Stage 3 we sub­tracted a 1 instead of 3 for the first let­ter and that made made the GPSr point back over where we just came from. Back track­ing again, pass­ing Stage 1 and the heads down shell hunters for the third time. A 1/3 of a mile later the nee­dle was now point­ing, because of the approach­ing high tide, out into the water.

Rechecked our num­bers and real­ized our mis­take. Re-entered the cor­rect coords and you can guess where they pointed, that’s right, back to where we were just a short time ago. I know this cou­ple were ded­i­cated to the busi­ness of hunt­ing for shells because on the forth time by they still hadn’t looked up at us. By the Stage 1 sign once more and over to the spot where the final stage should have been.

We were led right to where there was a geopath through the under brush and we searched and searched and came up empty. I backed up about 75 feet let the GPSR set­tled and fol­lowed it right to a sec­ond swath through the under­brush lin­ing the path about 15′ from the orig­i­nal spot. Both of us looked and looked and looked but couldn’t find any tupperware.

For some­thing that adver­tised no bushwack­ing needed we sure didn’t find any spot that fit the bill, but we did find plenty of places that had been bushwacked.

Sun­day
Cryp­to­zo­ol­o­gist Taylor’s Nessie
We arrived early on a quiet Sun­day morn­ing and parked right next to Stage 1. Not more than 50′ away was a Ford Crown Vic­to­ria with stripes on the side and a light bar on the roof.

We stood there any­way, read the engrav­ing on the stone mon­u­ment and then did the cipherin’ to find the coor­di­nates for Stage 2. When we plugged them in they pointed off in a direc­tion that was behind some fenc­ing whose gates were still closed.

We didn’t feel real com­fort­able hop­ping the fence and traips­ing off across the dew cov­ered grass with Johhny Law parked there, so we drove off.

What’s that spell? Noth­ing, but it does fin­ish up Alpha­bet Soup — South Car­olina Style.

I mapped out a loop that took us almost to Colum­bia because that is where the clos­est Z cache resided. We also needed a J and there were two of those within a cou­ple miles of the Z. SC302 to I-26 to US1, there were 14 caches within a 1/2 mile of the route and we did 6 of them.

Cross off one more county, Lex­ing­ton and one more DeLorme page, 37.

Guess what came in he mail today? If you said a newly refur­bished Garmin eTrex Ven­ture HC, give your­self a lol­lipop. We’ve loaded it with bat­ter­ies and taken it with us so we can com­pare how it works against our new Vista HCx tomorrow.

This morn­ing after Break­fast with the MMC™ we took a drive down to Jack­son to do a lit­tle caching. Jack­son is in Aiken County, which we obvi­ously already have, but it sits on a fairly des­o­late DeLorme Page (51.) We were 2 for 4, but that was OK as we only needed one to be con­sid­ered a suc­cess­ful expedition.

Plan A was to drive up early Sun­day morn­ing to Flo­rence for Break­fast with Lau­rie™, but we opted for Plan B, leave at 4PM on Sat­ur­day. This way we could do some caching on the way up too. Three for four with one absten­tion before it got too dark to see. Added two more coun­ties, Cal­houn and Orange­burg and two more DeLorme pages 45 & 46.

First up is Hockeyhick’s and Cache-n-Kerry’s Road-tripping Puck which is a sou­venir puck from the Greenville (SC) Grrrowl minor league hockey team. The team has since folded and the TB own­ers want this puck to be their proxie fan and to “take it to pee-wee games, high school and col­lege games, minor league and pro games, all around the globe!” We feel for the Greenville hockey fans as just last year the team over in Augusta pulled the same fold­ing act. Coin­ci­den­tally the Growl and the Augusta Lynx played against each other fre­quently because they were in the very same league. Sun­day before last we drove over to Augusta to take a pic­ture of the puck in front of the home of the Augusta Lynx, James Brown Arena.

Sec­ond is Simba from Disney’s pop­u­lar 1994 ani­mated fea­ture film The Lion King. Simba’s goal is to see as many zoos, cir­cus’ and habi­tats as he can before return­ing home. We found Simba in one of the caches from our big loop on Sun­day and when we got home and read the goal, Donna said, “Hey, there is a cir­cus com­ing to Augusta next week­end.” I checked the inter­web and it turns out the cir­cus was in town right then and the last show­ing was already well under­way. We hopped in the car and drove over any­way. Turned out it was per­fect tim­ing. The crowd was almost entirely gone and the roustabouts were just start­ing to strike the big top. Walked in, Donna held Simba in her hand, I snapped the photo and we left. We might swing by the River­banks Zoo in Colum­bia this week­end for another photo op.

I mean that not in a avian way, but in a Dead­head or Phish Fol­low­ers way. These are a few of ingre­di­ents that were stir­ring around in my sub­con­scious lead­ing to last night’s final dream:

1. Attend­ing the June CSRA Geo­cachers meet­ing where there were 60–70 people.
2. Read­ing the logs of caches where it seems like some folks travel in packs from 6 to 12 or more and do big quan­ti­ties of finds in a day.
3. A brief con­ver­sa­tion with a cache owner when I returned his ban­ished from SCDNR land ammo can.
4. A short scene from the last movie we watched, Invis­i­ble Cir­cus.
5. I ate too much junk from the Ryan’s Mega Bar the night before.
6. Wak­ing a 4AM to go to the bath­room, thus leav­ing enough time to get back into deep REM sleep before…
7. …being jolted awake mid dream so the last snip­pets were fresh in my brain.

We were out caching on a South Carolina back road and had just logged a find. Donna was sitting in the car planning our next destination and I was walking the short distance into the woods to replace the ammo can. Donna shouted, with a slight bit of alarm in her voice, "Brian!" I hastily tossed some pine straw over the cache and started out of the woods. I can see what caused her state. There parked on the other side of the road from where we were was a bus that looked like it came from a scene in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And out of the bus piled dozens of people aged from 8 to 80 in odd dress that looked like it was borrowed from J.F. Sebastian's manufactured companions in Blade Runner. There was juggling, a unicycle rider, tambourine playing, etc. As I got closer I recognized the faces, they belonged to geocachers from the local Club. Just as I was crossing the street to introduce myself to one of these characters with a Cyrano de Bergerac nose when the alarm went off.