Just south of Abbeville on the way home from a washed out caching/leaf peeping trip the Emperor passed the ninety nine thousand mile mark. Right now he is backed into the garage with the door partway up and a light shining on the vampire teeth…
We took a half a day off from work and drove up to North Carolina to retrieve our extra sheets and towels from the SMH and do a little leaf peeping. Early on in the drive we noticed that in the lower elevations in SC there were quite a few trees already changed and a lot that already dropped their leaves. We both thought that this would mean that as we got into the mountains everything would be dull and empty, but boy were we wrong. Along I-26 in the upstate of SC the trees were in peak color and as we got into the higher elevations of NC they were still plenty colorful.
Now that we are here the weather has turned against us. In the beginning of the week it looked like rain so we were hesitant, but as the week progressed the fore cast looked better. Yesterday when we made the reservation the chance of rain on Saturday was down to 20%. It is actually misting and wet that we are here and if you check the forecast for tomorrow in the SC upstate they are calling for a 70% of rain.
We have several caches mapped out do to for our challenges in the morning on the way home, we will just have to see how it turns out in the morning. Rain we head straight home, misty we cache until damp, dry we rack ’em up.
At one of our caching stops on Sunday we were in a patch of woods that had three of these jewel box spiders in large webs between trees. Made us make wide paths and hope against hope that we wouldn’t forget where the webs were in our hunt for the painted peanut butter jar.
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.
Veteran’s Memorial Park on Hilton Head Island
It is about 140 miles from HHI to Aiken and it usually takes a little over 3 hours to make the trip, but today it took us eight. No problems, unless you count 6 DNFs against just 4 Finds, but it was a bit longer than we had planned on spending on the road.
