Cars

Yesterday we were 10 for 11 on finding caches. We should have taken today off.

After yesterday’s ten finds we were at 480 for our total. I said, “Hey, let’s get 10 tomorrow and 10 on Monday and we’ll hit 500.” Ahhh, the best laid plans. There were 5 caches over on the Greenway in North Augusta that we still had to get, so I figured we would cruise down SC421 through the valley where there were 10 caches to try and get. For good measure I added two more along our route to the Greenway parking spot. We had a total of 17 on the list, surely we could come up with ten.

We have been avoiding the ones along 421 because most of the hides are near businesses and are micros in high muggle areas. Donna and I really enjoy the walk in the woods finds because there isn’t much chance of being seen and you don’t have to try and be stealthy. Figured we would be OK on an early Sunday morning, not much chance of too many people being out and about. The first place we stopped was at a small cafe. The restaurant was closed and the parking lot empty, but right next door was a very busy quick stop store. We had only half our attention on looking and the other half hoping nobody would call us on what we were doing.

It went downhill from there. Every time we would stop somewhere that appeared deserted, cars appeared like yellow jackets around a trash barrel in a picnic area. We missed the second one. We DNF’d the third and fourth. We drove right by #5 hoping to change our luck, like a batter in a hitting slump might change the way he ties his shoes. Didn’t work, we DNF’d the sixth. Donna just stayed in the car for number seven while I bumbled about. Good thing she did, as it gave her time to stare off 100 miles in the distance pondering our ineptitude, enabling her subconscious to spot the hide. Yippee, the streak was over.

Not for long though, as we promptly didn’t find the next three. We skipped the first one on the way into North Augusta as it was at a car wash and every bay was in use. The last one before the Greenway was a difficulty of 1 and a terrain of one. A person in a wheelchair found it 2 weeks earlier. We did not. So at that point we were the exact inverse of yesterday, we had missed 10 of 11.

Our funk continued on the Greenway as four of the five hides were by someone know for his creative containers and we have had trouble with his in the past. We missed 3 of what he called his “fantastic four” series.

Here is a representative of how bad we were at this caching thing today. The Greenway passes over a busy Martintown Road with a 75′ long metal bridge nicknamed the Greene Giant. There is a cache there by that name and because we needed all the help we could get, the first thing we did was read the hint because the last line of the cache description read: The hint is a give-away spoiler, so use only if necessary! Here is the hint: Very SW corner of the bridge, inside the fence, waist high. It still took us ten minutes to find the damn thing because we couldn’t figure out which way was southwest with a global positioning satellite receiver.

I consider us very lucky to have found the car where we had parked it, so we could drive home. Caching stats for today: 17 planned, 15 attempted, 12 DNFs, 3 finds and 2 abstaining.

While out caching in September one of our finds was called Bread Crumbs #2. I knew it was part of a series of caches from my reading of the description:

I designed the Bread Crumbs series #1-6 to lead cachers from North Augusta to Greenwood or Greenwood to North Augusta. In either location there are many very good caches that you can goto once you have reached which ever city you are heading for. On each container you will find clues for two finishing caches. One is in North Augusta the other is in Greenwood. you must complete the series # 1-6 in order to find either final cache. Also don’t forget my other two caches that i have along this route. One is “In the middle of nowhere”(GC1MH7R) the other is “Cachers Dash # 1″(GC1N1GB) which is another series of caches i have that leads you to a 5 stage multi cache. Good luck….kaboyd

So I alertly wrote down the snippet of coordinates that were on the cover of the container. Donna and I put it on our wish list to do the series in the future. The future turned out to be 2 months later in November. We started at Crumb #1 near Exit #1 of I-20 in North Augusta and worked our way to Greenwood. We skipped #2 because we already had that one in the bag. Each hide was well thought out with an nice spot for parking and it was just far enough into the woods so you wouldn’t be seen while you hunted. All the containers were the same, so you knew what to look for, and the route was 2-lane through almost entirely undeveloped land. The only one that gave us any problem was #6, it was slightly over 40′ from where our GPSr said GZ was, but once we had it we had all we needed to find the two final caches.

The Greenwood final cache was right up the street in a little park. As I turned into the parking area it was jam full of cars and loads people milling about. There was some sort of soccer game going on, so we opted to not even try. I backed up out of the lot and we came home, figuring we would come back in the future. The future turned out to be 2 months later in January. It was a sunny New Years Day, so we took a nice little top down drive back to Greenwood hoping there would not be a soccer game going. Turns out the place was deserted. Cool. About 400′ into the woods we found the cache. It was an odd looking container, almost looked like a miniature ships wheel with a screw off center.

We signed the log and left behind a couple of small trade items. Felt kind of weird finding a cache and not getting to log it as a find. I had searched Geocaching.com for the key words “bread crumbs”, but nothing came up in our area besides the numbers 1 through 6. And even though we wouldn’t get “credit” for either, we decided to do the North Augusta final in the future.

Last week while researching caches to do along the North Augusta Greenway, I found one at the far end from where we have been looking called, End of the trail ‘North Augusta’, and the description read:

The above coordinates are bogus.This is an unusual looking container that contains a log but byop. It is big enough for a few trade items (small) Also it is in the woods so be careful.

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This is the North Augusta end cache for my bread crumbs series # 1-6. You need the clues from each of the containers in that series to hunt this cache and the one in Greenwood.

HUH!?!? So I searched in Greenwood for something called End of the trail and sure enough there is the other one…. You do get credit for finding the final caches in the Bread Crumb series. We’ve been robbed! We have more finds than we thunk! We had a good idea on where to look for the final caches to see what date we had signed them, so we could log the finds on the web site, but knew there was no way we could find them again in a patch of woods without the actual coordinates. Trouble was after we found the two finals we tossed out the coordinates, so we will have to do #1 through #6 all over again.

Guess what we did today? Right. We set the alarm for early, ate breakfast and started out following bread crumbs. They were not too difficult to find the first time though and this time we made short work of locating each container. Park, walk a hundred feet into the woods, open the lid, grab the coordinate snippet and on to the next. We found a fly in the ointment at #3 though, the bonus cache coordinates were faded beyond recognition. The only thing I could make out was that they were for North Augusta, so we continued on to Greenwood, figuring we would worry about that little problem in the future.

There was no soccer game at the Greenwood park and after a spider web busting walk, we found the odd shaped container for the second time in 6 months. We opened it up and seeing as there was a new log, meaning no proof we had actually been here back in January, I went ahead and signed it. I’ll go online later today and log the now official find of the End of the trail ‘Greenwood’.

Because it was still early, we went over to Greenwood’s Rail to Trail where there was a series of 6 caches to look for. We started at the high numbered end and found #6, DNF’d #5, found #4, 3 & 2 before the combination of the heat, the distance left to #1 and the fact that 4 of the last 6 folks to look for it came up empty caused us to turn around and head back to the car. On the way back by we made another pass at #5 and couldn’t find it again.

Because it was such a pretty top down drive up, we drove back home via the same Bread Crumb route, but this time we had the top up and the air conditioner blasting. Donna wanted to try the North Augusta final next weekend, but I talked her into giving it try today so we could cross this series of that wish list. Bad move. It was now past 11:00 AM and it was probably above 90° and even though the North Augusta Greenway was still shaded, there was no breeze and the humidity was just as high as the temperature. We didn’t have the whole set of coordinates because of the faded Bread Crumb #3, but because both Donna and I remember finding the North Augusta final before, we figured we could spot the trail we thought it was off of and work it out. Using the trail, the degrees and the decimal portion of the minutes we had we could locate the cache. As we looked for that side trail a conversation, turned into a misunderstanding, which escalated into a DISCUSSION, stopping short of an argument, so after a half mile we did an about face and went back to the car defeated.

Because I didn’t blog about finding the North Augusta final I can’t pick out the date we did find it. And now looking back through our finds, I can’t seem to see any other found caches that would have put us any where close to the area where it should be. The only two times we cached near that end of the Greenway was in August of last year, before we even thought of doing this series. Maybe we didn’t do it. Odd.