12,000 Men in Blue and Gray

On the way back from HHI we grabbed a cache in another State Park in the Sandhills Challenge, Rivers Bridge.

Easy walk to the cache. We swapped out a couple SC Parks items for a couple of McToys and a coveted South of the Border bumper stickers.

After finding the cache we walked the mile straight trail to visit the battlefield. I guess because we are close to the anniversary of the actual February 2nd & 3rd battle there were a group a Civil War re-enacters touring the site as well. We stopped and listened as one gentleman read a letter from a Confederate survivor of the battle.

Thanks for bringing us here.

On February 2, 1865, a Confederate force under Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws held the crossings of the Salkehatchie River against the advance of the right wing of Sherman?s Army. Federal soldiers began building bridges across the swamp to bypass the road block. In the meantime, Union columns worked to get on the Confederates? flanks and rear. On February 3, two Union brigades waded the swamp downstream and assaulted McLaws?s right. McLaws retreated toward Branchville after stalling Sherman?s advance for only one day.

Although historically not a large battle, the Battle at River’s Bridge was significant because it is the last defensive effort of the Confederates against the march of Sherman’s army to Columbia. Actually, only in total, approximately 6,200 soldiers were involved in this battle – 5,000 Union soldiers, and 1,200 Confederate. 262 men were killed – 92 Union and 170 Confederate.

Somewhere on I-95 North this morning the Purple Whale passed over the 12,000 mile mark.

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!

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1104

Daily Driver

I’m betting the Emperor has thought that things have returned to the BPW (before purple whale) times as he has made the commute to work now for three days running. Today we even chanced a trip to work with the top down. The windows were up, but no heater was required. We didn’t make it out of the parking lot on the way home though.

When we exited the building there was on large dark gray cloud hovering over us like one of those giant flying saucers from the movie Independence Day. It started to lightly sprinkle as we walked to the north forty where we park and Donna wanted the top up, but I convinced her that once we got moving we wouldn’t get wet. We folded up cockpit cover, hopped in and hit the exit. Within 50 yards the rain started to come down harder and I reluctantly raised the roof. Good thing too as about a 1/4 mile from the Valve Store(R) it really started to come down.

The rain is supposed to be over before the morning commute and tomorrow’s high is predicted at 68°, with an overnight low of 60 (5 degrees above our average high for this time of year) we might even get both legs of Friday’s commute with the top down.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1103

125,000 Granules Of Sugar

The unseasonably warm weather continues and at the risk of having a blizzard hit Aiken, we really have had a very mild winter so far. We drove the Miata in to work today for the second day in a row. Tonight we are supposed to have a LOW of 51°, which is only a couple degrees lower than our average high for this time of year, which is why tomorrow we may even get to ride to work with the top down.

This morning while stopped at the bank to take some cash out for breakfast at DD the Emperor’s odometer stopped at exactly 125,000. Which, coincidentally, is the exact same amount of sugar granules that Dunkin’ Donuts sprinkles on top of my favorite breakfast item there, a Coffee Cake Muffin.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1102

Don’t Waste Your Money

On seeing Star Wars Episode 1 in 3D, there is a better Star Wars movie that you can watch now for free. Internet users were asked to remake “Star Wars: A New Hope” into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time. Here is the “Director’s Cut” version.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ezeYJUz-84#!

Or watch on YouTube: Star Wars Uncut

Off The Hook

While sitting on the couch last night using the laptop to plan today’s geocaching adventure to Columbia, Donna was watching Diners, Drive-In and Dives. We were thinking of eating lunch at California Dreaming, but our plans were changed by the 10:30 episode of Triple D, which featured a place called Pawley’s Front Porch.

First stop though was Sesqui-Centennial State Park in northeast Columbia that has 10 geocaches. Looking at the map at home it seemed like most of them were on the shorter loop that closely circles the lake. Turns out I was wrong, they were scattered all over the place, on and off, some of the dozen or so miles of trails. We ended up spending 3 hours and walking 6.4 miles finding 8 of 8 of the caches attempted.

After driving to 5 Points in downtown Columbia, we circled the block, asked directions and still got turned around. We ended up walking the last block before finding the restaurant around 1:30. After a 30 minute wait we were seated and ordered our burgers. I had the Wadmalaw (chipotle BBQ sauce, fried pickle chips, applewood smoked bacon and cheddar cheese), Donna had a Rockville (sauteed Vidalia onions, wild mushrooms and gruyere cheese) and Joan opted for the Front Porch (cheddar cheese.) The fries and onion ring sides were alright, but the burgers were awesome and worth the wait. Three hours later I was still full.

Bye Bye Powerball

Early on after we moved south, Retirement Plan B has been trying to win millions in a lottery drawing. At first we had to drive all the way to Georgia to buy our $1 Mega Millions ticket. Because we were over there at least once a month with the Bike Club and/or Miata Club we would buy a ticket for the next 4 weekly drawings.

Somewhere along the line they increased the number of drawings to twice a week, doubling our monthly expense to eight bucks. Then in 2002 South Carolina started selling tickets to the other multi-state lottery Powerball.
it was also a twice a week drawing meaning we were doubling our “investment” again.

Then two years ago we started saving gas because SC started selling tickets to both of the multi-state games and we could get them both on our weekly shopping trips. We would get a fresh Andrew Jackson as cash back at the check out and step over to the Service Desk and buy 5 weeks worth of plays in both lotteries.

Through all this time of buying tickets we never had a payout that amounted in the two figures. That’s right, we probably had about a dozen winning tickets of either 3 regular ball numbers or 1 regular number and the money ball, netting us about $100 total return.

This last time we went to get our group of tickets we were told that we couldn’t go past 3 weeks on the Powerball draws. Later we found out why, they were changing the game to make it easier to win. The total number of money balls were being reduced from 39, all the way down to 35, thereby reducing the odds of winning from 1 in 195 million to 1 in 175 million. But the buy in was increased to $2 of a draw.

We have decided that that was the straw that broke Brian’s wallet and have opted to just start buying just the MegaMillions tickets.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1099