Geocaching

Rule #22

“When in doubt, know your way out”

There have been a few times when we have been out geocaching that following this rule would have helped us find our way out of the woods. It is a simple thing to do too, when you exit the vehicle, turn the GPSr to a map page, hold down the button for a couple seconds and hit OK. You have now created a waypoint to help you find your way back to the car.

Trouble is that, like today’s little excursion, most of the time we are no more than 100′ into the trees and it just doesn’t seem to make sense to do it. And because I feel that way and don’t do it, it has never become habit, so that the times it could come in handy, that lifeline isn’t available. Hasn’t got us in trouble. Yet…

We dodged muggles, prejudicial clues and light rain, but not spider webs and briars on our way to 7 finds this morning just north of town. We stopped at seven because that gave us a nice little milestone, 500. If you are a member of the local geocaching cult,when you reach 1,000 finds they present you with an ammo can painted gold. We are not, so maybe I should cover a pill bottle in silver duct tape, present it to ourselves and go hide it somewhere.

Started up, went down, went up, back down, up again, down again, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 788

Thanks

Slept in a bit this morning and did a short bike ride, 10 miles total, ending up at Atlanta Bread Company for breakfast. A bagel each and a large OJ set me back $5 and some change. I swapped my last dollar for quarters so we could buy the Sunday Aiken paper, and because it was early with the sun behind some clouds, we ate our meal outdoors.

When we got home the weather wasn’t too bad (it was humid as all get out though) and we were already sweaty, I suggested we go out and grab the six caches we didn’t get yesterday. Donna was up for it, so we changed real quick and jumped in the car.

We had quite an assortment of styles of caches on the list too. If you look in the geocaching dictionary under bushwhacking, our first cache would be listed as a prime example. It is about 350 feet from the road and the only humans who have been in this patch of woods since the earth’s crust cooled are the 63 people who have found this cache and the 1 person who placed it there. Luckily it is just a bunch of dense underbrush and pine trees and not much in the way of thorny bushes. Finding the black painted mayonnaise jar was not too hard, but because I didn’t set a way point at the parking spot, the trip out was a little longer, and we came out of the woods about 50 yards away from the Emperor. The second was a short little 2 stage multi behind a hotel just a little further down the road. Number three was a mystery cache, you needed to solve a small crossword puzzle to come up the coordinates. I solved the puzzle last weekend and this weekend Donna found the cache. The fourth one on our loop was 5 feet into the trees at a short pullout on a busy high speed two lane road. The fifth was the very definition of one of my favorite geocaching phrases, “A 35mm film canister well integrated into the environment.” The sixth and last cache of the day was an ammo can next to a tree about 200′ off a back road which required traversing a long stretch of scrub grass, crossing a picket line of briars before entering a bit of woods.

The best story came from cache #5, called “Ice Ice, Baby” and here is how I logged it on geocaching.com:

Considering the name of the cache, as we approached in the geomobile I figured it was going to be something magnetic stuck to the ice machine outside. When I stopped in front of the establishment the GPSr said there was 165′ more to go. So much for that idea. I went inside to buy a cold drink and my wife went in search of the cache.

I walked inside and the proprietor was on the phone reading bible verses to someone (it was Sunday morning after all.) She said hello and I went to the drink coolers and pulled out Diet Sprite. As I headed towards the counter she started to wrap up her conversation, I stopped her from hanging up. I had opened my wallet up and noticed that it was empty, I forgot that I had spent the last 6 dollars earlier in the day at Atlanta Bread Company for our breakfast. She looked at me questionably when I told her not to hang up and I explained that I didn’t have any money and showed her the empty wallet. I started back towards the cooler with the drink, and she stopped me. She said, “Keep it. It’s hot outside, I can’t deny you a cold drink. It’s only a dollar, it’s not going to kill me and if it does, so be it.” I thanked her and left the store figuring my wife must have found the cache by then.

She was sitting on a retaining wall with a look that I recognized as defeat. I told her my story, we drank our cold Diet Sprite with gratitude and when we were finished, started the search anew. A couple minutes later she made the find.

Next Sunday at around the same time we plan on stopping back at that store and buying another cold Diet Sprite and paying two dollars for it.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 762

Back In The Saddle Again

We went out geocaching this morning for the first time in a couple of weeks. I had a map with about a dozen caches picked out, but we only managed 4. No we didn’t DNF the other 8, but merely never got to them. There were two new ones along the Boyd Pond Bike Trail south of town. We had done the four caches around the pond last September and we swore we would come back and walk the trail again soon, but never did. Now was our opportunity. Went the more direct route to the cache and opted for the “scenic”, windy way out and ended up walking 4.2 miles total. and quite a 4.2 miles it was.

Turned on the computer this morning and the relatively recent Samsung SyncMaster 2233SW Monitor flashed its display for a second and then went black. Rebooted and it did the same thing while loading the bios, so it wasn’t Windows 7. The updated Bios from the other day? Doubtful. Had to be either video card or monitor. I let the PC boot up and I could make the display come on for a second by turning the monitor off and then back on. Trying to work like that would be very time consuming and annoying after a very short time. To be sure it was the monitor’s fault and not the video card I plugged a VGA cable into the laptop and tried to used the monitor as a second display, but got a the same problem, a brief glimpse of a desktop and then black.

Checked the internet for possible quick fixes, but found none. I did find the the monitor carried a 1 year parts and labor warranty. We bought it on June 14th last year which made it 1.13 years old. to Quote Agent 86, “Missed it by that much Chief.” After lunch we went to Staples to buy a replacement. In our price range there was a Dell and 2 different Samsungs. We picked the Dell, after all the Dell monitor that originally came with the PC lasted 6 years and the Samsung only did a little over a year. The Dell comes with a one year warranty and on the way out the salesman tried to sell us a one year extended warranty for $25. Donna was sorely tempted, but I talked her out of it. I did make a deal with with her, if this Dell only makes it just over the one year mark before crapping out, I would opt for every extended warranty ever offered me.

Finished up Season 2 Disc 6 of Law & Order this after noon. We love seeing the folks who were cutting their acting chops on the show way back in the early 90 and the ones who make one show guest starring plots. The final two episodes on the disc treated us to each of George Costanza’s parents Jerry Stiller on one show and Estelle Harris on the other. We also got Sam Rockwell in only his 10th credited role. We also got a very young Sabrina Llyod, AKA Natalie from Sports Night. The second to last show was the first ever appearance of Leslie Hendrix as the coroner, Dr. Elizabeth Rodgers, who I bet is very thankful for Dick Wolf as she has had pretty steady work since then playing that role. She has done 142 episodes of the original Law and Order, along with 104 episodes of Law and Order Criminal Intent, 9 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and even one appearance on the short lived Law & Order: Trial By Jury.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 761

27b/6

Got to 27b/6, sub titled “Go Away”, for some fun reading. You can while away several hours there (as I have done) reading very humorous bits and email exchanges that will make you literally LOL!

We got up at the usual time this morning and headed off to Edgefield to check out the breakfast place that we didn’t make it to last Saturday, the Ten Governor’s Cafe. After one small misdirection we made the 20 mile trip on a simply beautiful back road that dumps you onto the Edgefield downtown square under the watchful eye of a life-size bronze Strom Thurmond. Wouldn’t you know it, but the restaurant was closed for a week’s vacation and wouldn’t re-open until tomorrow. We are pretty sure we are going to use it, food untested, based solely on the great drive to get there, after all, we are a car club…

The moratorium on geocaching continues, we didn’t do any this morning having already found all we were going to last weekend and tomorrow morning we are going for a quick bike ride before the temperatures reach triple digits. We will then probably spend the rest of the day indoors watching le Tour, a Netflix movie (Frost/Nixon) and a couple of torrented TV shows or some Instant Watch movies or some old crappy movies that are playing on Starz or Encore.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 726

BANG!

This morning as I opened the garage door there occurred a loud BANG! Over my head the garage door spring banged into the support bracket. I was headed out to wash the car, but instead I made a trip to Home Depot. Bought new springs and a couple of new eye bolts. I really needed just one to replace the one that got mangled when the spring smashed into it, but figured why should one new spring be jealous of the other over an old eye bolt.

Inside the box with the springs were two long pieces of wire that were probably there as some sort of safety thing, but the instructions on the box didn’t really spell out how they were to be used. I installed the new springs and because they were a little shorter that the current ones I had to adjust the cables a little. It wasn’t until then that I figured out how the cables worked. Trouble was to install the safety cables I would need to totally disassemble what I had just completed. That was not going to happen. I may have to engineer something to retro fit the safety wires. I got lucky this time because I didn’t have the safety wires and the spring broke on the end it did. If it had busted on the eye bolt end and not the pulley end it might have hit the door and bounced around instead of just slamming into the support.

The reason I was opening the garage door was to go out and change the Emperor’s oil and rotate his tires which I now proceeded to do, just a couple hours later. While I had the car up on jack stands with the wheels off, I did a couple of maintenance items. I have had a high pitched chirping noise that was only noticeable in the early morning when driving through our quiet neighborhood. It would totally disappear when I pushed in the clutch pedal. The most common cause of this is the clutch actuating fork vibrating against the slave cylinder’s operating rod. The cure for this to slap a bunch of grease on the fork where the rod hits it. Luckily I had some bicycle wheel bearing grease in the cabinet that fit the bill. The other thing was to check and see if the brake slider pins needed lubricating.

Last year when I had the stuck pin someone at work recommended using a copper based lubricant instead of the usual tube of whatever that you get at the auto parts store. I checked with the hive knowledge of the Miata.net forums and while I didn’t get a unanimous opinion that it was a great idea, I didn’t get enough negative comments to rule it out, so I decided to run a test, one side got the usual lube and the other got the copper stuff. Today when I checked them one side was fine, but the other was stuck pretty good. Guess which one was bad? Go ahead guess. Right, the one where I used the non-traditional copper based anti-seize lube. I could back out one pin by twisting and pulling. The other was going to need more persuasion, so I unbolted the bracket and locked in the bench vise. I grabbed an open ended wrench and a hammer and started to tap on the wrench to force the pin out. After about 3 or 4 taps is wasn’t moving, so I decided to hit it a bit harder when BANG! I hit my thumb. I did a little dance accompanied by some vocals before returning to the task where I did get finally get the pin out. I now have a pencil eraser sized black spot on my left thumbnail.

One pin was pretty scarred up and the hole in the caliber bracket the pin slides into wouldn’t come clean either. To fix this I cleaned up the easy to remove pin, a pin I had extra from last year’s brake job and I re-used last year’s bad bracket (which had been cleaned up and saw a brief stint as a napkin holder.) After getting everything all buttoned up I made a tour of the neighborhood to test out the brakes, they worked just fine. I am going to take the scarred up pin and bracket into work and drop them on the desk of the fellow who suggested the copper lubricant…

To finish off the Emperor’s spa day I gave him a bath and an interior vacuuming tonight.

I bet you’re wondering how we did geocaching today. We didn’t have a single DNF, of course we didn’t have a single find either because after our extreme up and down days on Saturday and Sunday we figured a day off might be good for our mental health.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 717

Sometimes You Get The Cache & Sometimes The Cache Gets You

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.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 715

That’s Entertainment

Le Tour started today with the Prologue Time Trial. A zippy little 5.5 mile jaunt around the Dutch town of Rotterdam. Lance Armstrong is in 4th place 22 secs back having completed .25% of the total mileage of the race. I know Lance is fourth because it was posted on Google News (from the New York Times) in the Entertainment Section.

We hit the road this morning with the intention to check out a possible location for the MMC Breakfast drive we lead later this month. Destination was the Ten Governor’s Cafe in downtown Edgefield. Of course there was some geocaching involved too. After we found a couple of them at Exit 11 of I-20 we were going to drive to Exit 1 where we had planned to start the breakfast run, but we were getting hungry, so we opted to head up the Bettis Academy Road to US25 thereby shortening the trip by 20 minutes or so. A couple miles up the road we passed by a small airport community where folks have a giant garage, otherwise known as hangers. We actually know somebody who lives in there, someone from our old Aiken Bike Club days. As we drove by we both noticed the small white building with a couple of cars out front that had a sign that said Airport Cafe! We’ve driven this way numerous times, but never noticed that before. We looked at each other questioningly and Donna said, “Turn around.”

There were maybe 6 tables for four inside and two of them had people at them. We picked one of our own and sat. It was two person operation, her (waitress/cashier) and him (cook), so service was kinda of hit or miss, but the food was hot and good tasting, plus cheap. It certain fit the bill of Club’s Breakfast Drive originator. We may be the biggest group they ever dealt with, but I think we found our spot. Next weekend we may go check out the Ten Governor’s Cafe as a back up plan.

We looped through Trenton (1 find), Edgefield (1 find, 1 DNF), back to North Augusta via Martintown Rd (3 finds) and on to the Greenway (5 finds.) One of the Greenway caches was the last of the Bread Crumb series, The End of the Trail – North Augusta. Donna wanted me to just say as little as possible so as not to raise the ire of the CO, but you know me:

Last Saturday we didn’t have the minutes portion of the hide’s coordinates (we did have the degrees & and the decimal minutes portions) and because we thought we had done this one earlier this year we walked right by the cache. After we gave up trying to remember where we were before we headed home. It was there we realized we *hadn’t* done this before and what we were remembering was the final of the Color Code Series…

I plotted out about 10 different combinations of possible locations of the final using any north & west minutes that kept us in North Augusta, but figured the best chance of finding it was near the end of the Greenway, close to where the Question Mark showed. And that is where it was.

Thanks for the series. My wife and I thoroughly it enjoyed it and will wonder for a very long time what the heck were those containers for the finals.

I hope I didn’t knock off the scab…

Started down, went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 714