This Looks Familiar

Donna and I have criss-crossed the state of South Carolina several times. First just to get acquainted when we moved here, then chasing every post office in the state and more recently searching for geocaches in every county and on every DeLorme page. There is hardly a SC numbered highway tat we haven’t traveled, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that we had been to Lake Warren State Park before, but it did.

We had even walked the entirety of the nature trail before on a previous journey. This time we were here for the Caches, of which there were two. One cache, the one we were really there after, one our current obsession, the Sandhills Regional Challenge, was on a small loop trail near the lake. The second was on the previously mentioned nature trail. The Sandhills Challenge was was a quick find, but the Savannah’s Tin Hat Treasure was another story:

Our GPSr has been giving us fits recently. I think the Electronic Compass is affecting the directional arrow, when following the arrow to caches it has a tendency to suddenly point askew, while the distance slowly ticks down correctly. When using the map feature the pointer that represents our direction does the same thing. Twisty trails don’t help at all. This has us wandering in circles quite a bit.

This trek was a fine example, we ended up getting turned around several times and when our distance got down below 300′ we charged into the woods bushwhacking away, figuring it was our only chance. Fortunately the water level was winter low or we probably would have gotten our feet wet.

We made the find and took a McToy Panda Bear while leaving a bunny and a South of the Border bumper sticker. We walked the opposite way we came in, thereby stumbling on the trail a mere 40′ away from GZ. We walked in the direction we thought would take us back to where we parked, but as it turned out we found the trail end where the bench overlooking the pond is. Dang, the trail is not a loop and we had turned the wrong way. We could see our car, it was so close, but there was no way to get to it except to retrace the entire trail back. Meh, not us, I lead another bushwhacking expedition towards the road I could see. Probably would have been shorter to go back on the trail…we managed to turn what probably is a 1 mile walk into double that.

Thanks for the cache!