Month: July 2009

Oh Deer

Oh DeerAbout 4:30 this afternoon we looked at each other and said, “Let’s go.” We loaded up the Miata with knapsacks, walking sticks, hiking boots, some ice water, a cut up apple and headed into Hitchcock Woods to find “SECTION”. I had pretty much given up on finding this one, we had the Stage 1 coordinates, but in three attempts could not locate the small cache with the coords for Stage 2. A fellow cacher who was one of the half dozen or so to have found this one had offered a hint after our second try, but I was reluctant. Call it a function of the gene that makes us males incapable of asking for directions, I didn’t want the hint, but Donna with Marisa Tomei’s help convinced me to take it.

Mona Lisa Vito: So what’s your problem?
Vincent Gambini: My problem is, I wanted to win my first case without any help from anybody.
Mona Lisa Vito: Well, I guess that plan’s moot.
Vinny Gambini: Yeah.
Mona Lisa Vito: You know, this could be a sign of things to come. You win all your cases, but with somebody else’s help, right? you win case after case, and then afterwards you have to go up to somebody and you have to say, “thank you.”
[pause]
Mona Lisa Vito: Oh my God, what a f**king nightmare!

With the hint we found the Stage 1 container within minutes of arriving at GZ. The coordinates for Stage 2 were loaded up and off we went. A few minutes into the trip a big rustling sound came off from our right. We had spooked a deer. She circled through the woods a bit and came back out on the trail 25 yards ahead of us, eyeballed us for a minute or so, then danced away. When we started it said the cache was .25 miles away right straight down the Palmetto Ride trail where the Stage 1 was hidden off of. The distance steadily decreased to about half that before the trail headed off in a perpendicular direction. The distance to the cache grew and grew until it was over a third of mile off, before the trail turned back and the distance started to came down again. When it got down to around 300 feet the trail again turned 90 degrees away from the cache.

Knowing the trail eventually looped back again, but not for a long while, when went off-trail and made a beeline for our goal (well, as much a beeline as possible through the thick brush and brambles, dang, the scratches from last weekend’s bushwhacking expedition were just starting to disappear.) The GPSr led us straight to a small dam that we had been to long before when we were just hiking in here and not looking for ammo cans well integrated into the environment. To the left was an algae covered pond, to the right was a 30 foot drop and the direction indicator said 60′ straight across the two foot wide concrete dam. Neither of us were foolhardy enough to try the balancing act, so we weighed the steep wooded drop to the small stream below the dam or the long trail to the other side.

The long walk won out because we knew that was easier to get to the dam from the Low Country Ride trail from previous experience. When we got around to the other side of the dam the GPSr did it again, pointed straight across the dam the other way and read sixty feet. Niiice, now what?

We fight the only slightly less steep downhill on this side through thick underbrush to the very bottom of the ravine about 90′ downstream from the dam. The GPSr was now pointing right at the dam. Damn. We daintily hop a very murky looking stream and fight more thick vines with thorny sides until we are at the base of the dam. There inside the three foot square opening of a water gate was an ammo can. FOUND IT! (For some reason it was totally unnecessarily hidden behind a couple pieces of broken clay pipe, like there would ever be any foot traffic down here and they might accidentally spot it…)

We signed the log, climbed the hill back to the trail and headed out of the woods. Total miles walked, 3.0; total time spent in the woods, 1:55:30; average speed, 2 mph; total bleeding scratches on my legs and arms, 5.

Sure hope they never have to open that overflow gate, they’ll no one will ever see that ammo can again.

Oh, and OddAngles, “Thank you.”

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 302

Historic 1940 Tour de France Picture

Historic 1940 Tour de France PictureBecause folks know I bicycle and that my wife and go out of our way to get the cable upgrade just so we can watch the Tour de France every year, I have received this picture via email from co-workers 3 times in the last two days. Ha, ha, ha.

We toke a hike in Hitchcock Woods this evening and hid our third geocache. This one is called “No Horses Allowed” because it is placed along one of the two trails we know of that are closed to horses due to erosion concerns and or steepness. We have got a couple more planned for placing in the woods and then we are going to have to find some other locations. Not that the we are getting anywhere close to having caches too near each other, within 500′ is the limit, but when we are done with those two there will be an even dozen in the Woods and that is probably plenty.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 302

Really Awsome Stuff Found On The Web

In case any one every asks if I have a license to geocache, I can now say yes thanks to Renzo Tobias. I took his idea, added a little color, printed one out, signed and laminated it then tucked it in my wallet:
Geocacher's License

io9 has a post today that digs up 201 different Star Wars T-shirts. If you owned all of these and started on the first of the year you might just be starting to wear repeats about now. My favorite, #149:
Jedi Boob Trick

From the Download Squad, behold The Most Amazing Website On The Internet:
My Cat Carl

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 301

PayPal Bonus

A couple weeks ago I had an unauthorized charge show up on my PayPal account. I only had a little over $10 in there, the charge amounted to about $35 and because my checking account was linked, they took the overage from it. I disputed the charge with both PayPal and the merchant and they both agreed I was wronged, so my money was returned with in a couple days.

I basically only use PayPal for an occasional eBay purchase, but in the past I’ve used it for snap deals found on the net, so a credit card is also linked. After digging through the PayPal help pages I discovered that they could do an instant transfer from my checking because I had that CC listed as a back-up source. Wanting to ensure that they couldn’t just yank money out of my checking account again, I removed the credit card.

Well, because someone had used my account without permission PayPal had me do a couple of things before they would let me access my money again. One of which was change my password and another was to change my security questions. Both were no brainers and easy to do.

The third thing they wanted was to confirm my address. This was the sticky one. The easy way to confirm my address was to link a charge card to my account. Nah, don’t want to do that, that’s what got me in this mess in the first place. There is another way, PayPal could mail a code to my snail mail address that I could, when received, enter into their site. Trouble was I didn’t meet the requirements for this option, because I had a dispute within the last 3 months.

I stewed for a week figuring out what I should do.There were no worries about anyone getting any money out of the account during this time because it was frozen while we confirmed my address. The plan I came up with was to confirm with a credit card and then once I had access to my money, pull it all out and close the PayPal account.

To make sure that the card, and consequently my address, were good they were going to charge the card $1.95 and then promptly refund it. I forgot all about the whole thing until about 5 days later when I got an email from PayPal saying they were giving me a bonus. I thought, wow, that’s nice, must be to make up for the hassle I’ve been through, they added a dollar ninety five into my account.

Hey, wait a minute!

I checked my CC online and sure enough they had no trouble withdrawing money, but they never refunded the card. They turned around and credited my money into my PayPal account and called it a bonus.

That cinched it, I transferred my measly $60 back into my bank and I’m shutting down my PayPal account.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

What the Heck Happened?

Ugly WallThe FRS started the “second half” of the season with a three game lead over the MFY in the AL East. Both teams have played four games since then, and after last night they are in a first place tie. Tonight the Sox are losing to the Texas Rangers and the Yankees are beating Baltimore, if everything stays as it is they will find themselves looking up in the standings to the Yanks.

We attempted a nifty puzzle cache that took us to the Aiken County Veterans Memorial Park the other night. We had a list of names to look for in the brinks in the walkway surrounding a fountain, they were a mixture of individual donors, companies and tributes to the fallen. To facilitate finding individual bricks they were arranged in a grid with letters for columns and numbers for rows. We quickly realized we needed the numbers to arrange them into the next set of coordinates. Didn’t have time right then, so we finished the juggling at home with the intentions of going back.

Yesterday we headed back over there with our new GZ to look for the cache. The GPSr led us right to a big crape myrtle surrounded by lots of low bushes and seemed tailor made for hiding a cache. It must have been hidden real good because we didn’t find it after 10 minutes of crawling around there. When we got home I emailed the cache owner and asked for confirmation of our coordinates.

This morning the reply came to the effect that there were no bushes anywhere near the cache. Dang we have the wrong coordinates. Rechecking all the possibilities it turns out we missed one and it was only 137 feet due west from where we were looking yesterday. After dinner tonight we went back to this set of coords and there were no bushes and there was a cache.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Around The Block

Rollerblading TrackWent for a neighborhood blading session this evening and put the GPSr in my pocket. What you see here is my path. One big loop around the ‘hood is a little more than 3/4 of a mile, but I include several back and forth passes through the side streets to make it longer. This is route resulted in 2 miles. If I want to go further than that I can just leave the safety of my neighborhood and head out into one of several nearby places that are just as flat and traffic free.

Tonight’s obligatory geocaching content: While regaling my co-workers with tales of my weekend’s worth of geocaching, one (Hi Mark) asked me if I was planned on visiting all of the geocaches in South Carolina like I did for the Post Offices. I said I doubt it, there are probably a lot more caches than POs. This got me wondering, how many are there in South Carolina. Turns out it was easier to find out than I though. If you click on the SEEK link on Geocaching dot com it takes you to a page where you can find caches using all kinds of criteria, with by state being one of them. Turns out there are over 3,700! (there are almost 68,000 in CA.)

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300

Old Guys Almost Rule

1) Fifty-nine year-old Tom Watson almost won the British Open.

2) Thirty-seven year-old Lance Armstrong couldn’t hang with Alberto, but still is in 2nd place in the GC.

3) Fifty-three year-old Brian Bogardus can only seem to find half of the geocaches he is looking for.

Brian_the_Red found The Retirement Cache (Traditional Cache)
We were 2 for 2 on the Odell Weeks caches tonight after a pizza dinner at Ferrandos. Nicely done on the hide, been wondering when we would see one of these in action.

Brian_the_Red found Love Sports-Hook, Line and Sinker (Traditional Cache)
We were 2 for 2 on the Odell Weeks caches tonight after a pizza dinner at Ferrandos. We had never attempted these 2 at the Weeks Center for fear they would be right along the walking track and awfully hard to get stealth-fully. But we were pleasantly surprised that they were far enough away as to be easy to not get muggled.

Brian_the_Red couldn’t find “SECTION” (Unknown Cache)
Sometimes you get the cache and sometimes the cache gets you.

This one has got us stumped, we just can’t find stage 1. The cache owner has confirmed we solved the code right, so our coordinates are correct and he even gave us a small clue…

They say it takes a big man to admit defeat, well tonight I am a very big man.

Brian_the_Red couldn’t find Valor is a Virtue (Unknown Cache)
Didn’t get a chance to find the cache yesterday as we got a late start with this one and ran out of light to finish solving for the coordinates.

Came back today and went hunting for the cache. We spent quite a bit of time hiding in the bushes avoiding the surprising amount of cars driving by. While we were in there we looked with no success.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 300