Georgia’s Stonehenge, just outside of Elberton.
Seeing as we have completed the South Carolina DeLorme Challenge and have in our hot little hands the coordinates for the final cache in the South Carolina County Challenge we were looking for a new adventure. The Georgia State Parks Geo-Challenge looks like a winner. There is a geocache in 42 of Georgia’s 48 State Parks and we are setting off to find them all. Today we bought a yearly pass to Georgia State Parks creating an October 31, 2011 deadline for us to finish this challenge.
Seeing as we were also scouting routes for the MMC’s Leaf Peeping run in two weeks we headed up to the northeast Georgia mountains to start the Challenge. Here is the log I wrote for our first successful find in the series:
We arrived at the park office to get a trail map and stumbled on a small group of Augusta area geocachers. We chatted for a bit then hopped in our respective cars for the drive to the cache. I headed out first with them in hot pursuit. At a fork in the road, I went right, while they, after hesitating went left. Donna and I had plugged in the trailhead parking coords and attacked it from that way. The other 4 used the “drive on the road that will take you nearest the cache” approach. Amazingly enough both teams converged on ground zero at the same time.
Using the hint, I walked right to where I suspected the ammo can would be. It wasn’t. I then did a quick 360 scan and spotted a UPS. Headed over to where I was sure the cache would be, only to be foiled again. Another horizon scan and another UPS, this better be it. On our way over there my wife tripped on a branch, falling down as a distraction, so I could make the find before the Augusta group. Way to go girl! (OK, I’m kidding about the distraction thing. But she really did take an accidental fall as we approached the cache. Total damages, a bit of wounded pride, one scraped knee and probably have a black and blue patella tomorrow.)
We all signed the log, rifled through the schwag, trading nothing, and each group dropped in a Travel Bug. The Augusta folks that needed to stamp their GA Park Geo-Challenge passport thingie did and then each group headed off in opposite directions, back off to their cars. We had left our passport back in the car, which was par for pretty much the way our day was going, so when we got back to the car, we grabbed the paper and walked back to the cache again to stamp it.
After stamping the page, yippee, one down forty-one to go, we grabbed up the TB that one of the Augusta cachers had just dropped off, to make the trip back doubly worth it. I hope the rest of the State Park finds are this interesting?
It wasn’t the first one we tried though, we missed out on the cache in Tallulah Gorge State Park, but that is a story for another day, and do I mean story.
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