Breakfast and a Cache

For the second month in a row we combined the MMC breakfast event and some geocaching. We ate at a place that Donna and I have driven by hundreds of times since living here, but never ever thought to go in, the Hard Hat Cafe which sits on the hill going west out of Graniteville, SC. It is the sort of place that is just where one should eat breakfast and is what the originator of this idea for the club had in mind – Mom & Pop places with bottomless coffee for less than a buck (it was good too.) This one was a little different in that not only could you order off the menu, but they had a buffet and that is where the nine of us ate from.

After chow when everyone went their separate ways Donna and I went back down into downtown Graniteville to hopefully find a puzzle geocache – “Milling” Around Town which is sort of like the one we didn’t get in Waynesboro last month.

This one had 6 stages and at each one you had to read a sign or count something that gave a number that needed to be plugged into a spot in the coordinates for finding the next stage. We misinterpreted the very first clue, but didn’t find out until the very end because we had the instructions and are familiar enough with the town to know all the landmarks that the stages ended at. We got to stage 5 (pictured above) and solved the math problem giving us the last numbers for the coordinates, they turned out to tell us that the spot where the actual cache was 1.9 miles to the west. All the other clues were within a 1/4 mile of each other, so that just had to be wrong.

As we walked back to the car Donna was reading all the log notes that I printed out and noticed that someone a couple months back had missed the same clue as we did and sort of gave us the answer. Amazing how if you figure wrong on a clue and then reuse that clue in the addition or subtraction math of another clue, the check sum still comes out correct even when your numbers are off…

After refiguring out the math using this new information we were less than a quarter of a mile away, much better. When we got to the final coordinates, it was intimately familiar, we were just there. We walked around awhile looking for the described 6″ long cylindrical cache in frustration, then as we sat on a bench deciding whether to give up this whole geocaching thing entirely, I noticed in the bush behind us a green tube. Eureka!