Geocaching

Guess what we did today? Right. Geocaching. Not once, but twice.

We headed out early on the tandem to pay bills and catch a few caches. Our first stop was dropping off the cable bill and from there we hustled across the southside to a church where there was a regular size tupperware that held a travel bug. We beat everybody, even the preacher, to the parking lot. The advertised TB was’t inside, but one of the missing ones from yesterday was, so we took it. Logged our find and headed over to the complex of office buildings nearby.

We were there for one of four postal themed caches we had earmarked for the ride. The four are small to micro sized containers near blue USPS mail drop boxes. This first one was hid in some bushes and the hint mentioned “The bushes are very sticky.” My index finger on the right hand is still a little tender where a holly leave punctured it. And we didn’t find the cache.

Next we went a little way down the road to a box in a shopping center parking lot. I spotted this one quickly. It was a bison tube inside a small replica of a blue mail drop box. As we signed the log we noticed that there was a car at a bank ATM that was sitting there the whole time and the passenger kept glancing our way, it was a regular “mutual wonder what the heck are they are doing society.”

Next one was down a hill through a country club to a medical plaza and blue box. This one was in the bushes and it consisted of mini replica of a home mail box. Signed the log and thought we were smart in avoiding a very steep hill back up by going a different way, but it turned out to be a much longer and tougher climb.

The last of the series was another bison tube with a trickier hide. After rolling the log sheet back up and stuffing it back in the tube we opted to head home and get breakfast. The 4.3 miles walking on Friday, 4.7 on Saturday and 9 miles on the bike today was starting to take its toll, we could go out later to pay the 2 remaining bills (by car.)

The Birthday Bug we grabbed at our first cache of the day was bigger than we wanted to take out west and it listed a bunch of nearby places it wanted to visit, so after lunch we headed for an ammo can over in North Augusta. But before we went there Donna thought we ought to swing by our one miss of the morning. Because we had done the other three of the postal series, we now thought we had a pretty good idea of what we were looking for. Sure enough Donna spotted the small home mail box replica standing up while I was back on my hands and knees looking under holy bushes. The ammo can was an easy find, because the hint gave pretty much gave it away and we picked up an unexpected geocoin to add to our bounty.

We now have 9 travelers to take on our vacation, but we think that we might drop one in Columbia somewhere on Friday and then a second one in Charlotte on Saturday before catching a plane to lighten our load.

We collected two travel bugs yesterday so we could take them out west with us next week. Today we thought we’d snag a few more.

There were two TBs in a close by cache we had already visited, so it would be a quick park and grab. Unfortunately neither of them were in the container. On the bright side, there was a traveling item in there, that was a recent drop (after I had last checked the cache status.)

There was a second cache at the library that had the same parameters, 2 TBs and we had visited it before too. Like the first stop, neither of the listed items were present in the cache. Unlike the first one though, this one didn’t have a bonus bug.

We had one more spot we had been before and this one had three travelers including one whose goal was to make it back to Arizona which was right up our alley. But, what had now become a trend, there were no TBs in the ammo can here either.

After this we headed into Hitchcock Woods to watch the annual Horse Show and visit a couple caches. One of them, Cuthbert Cache had two Travel Bugs, but this cache had proved elusive two weeks ago on two tries, once on our way into the woods and again on the way out. This time we beat the bushes for around 15 minutes in frustration, we even checked on the wrong side of the trail from where the clue said it should be, just because one time the the GPS needle twitched that way. We both wanted to call it quits and took two steps away before I turned around to make one more pass. I found it! Hot diggity! Now looking at where it was hid, I can’t believe we missed it for so long.

The second one in the woods also had two travelers and we had found it before. This one, Up Sand Creek, at least had one of the two advertised TBs, so we pocketed it on our way back out of the woods.

With our success with the Cuthbert Cache on our third try, we decided to make a quick detour to make a third pass on Horsey Place. Once again the third time was a charm. As a nice surprise, there was a Travel Bug for our taking.

After a second consecutive more than 4 mile walking day we called it quits for the day and headed home for showers, a late lunch and some TV watching. That lasted almost 6 hours before we started planning caches to find tomorrow morning,we plan on biking into town to pay bills. One thing led to another and we spotted one that had a couple travel bugs (we hoped), but is was part of a trio in a park that wasn’t conducive to grabbing by bicycle.

So, that’s right, we went back out in the car and ended up walking around a mile tracking these caches down. First stop was an ammo can with the travel bugs and it went pretty smoothly except we were on the wrong side of a chain link fence. We both hopped it (that was a lot harder to do than we remembered, seeing as the last time we probably hopped a fence was 25 years ago.) At least both bugs were in the can, so they could be added to our collection. Cache #2, A Cut Above the Rest, was a micro and the GPS led us to the likely spot, but we weren’t having much luck until Donna read the title out loud for the third time and she realized we needed to look up. Bingo! The third cache was a two stage multi with two micros. We found the first part in short order and that gave us to coordinates for the second part. That lead us across a big open field into the opposite tree line. Ground Zero looked like a neighborhood trash dump in which neither one of us felt comfortable poking around in. We gave up looking for the camoe film canister in short order. I emailed the cache owner for a hint, we’ll see what happens.