Geocaching

The MMC had a breakfast rally to Waynesboro, Georgia. We went, ate and instead of driving back with the group, we went, that’s right, geocaching.

There were four located in and around downtown, three were listed as easy and one was a difficult, rating 4 out of 5 stars. Based on our results those ratings were pretty much dead on.

Donna was really interested in the difficult one because we had to solve a puzzle, which looked like fun, to get the final coordinates and that was our first planned stop, but when after breakfast the group made a short drive to a local Mennonite bakery we passed right by the location of an easy one. Because it was on our way to the puzzle one, we stopped at the Confederate Cemetery first.

Being recent converts and flush with excitement for our new endeavor we did what any other neophyte might, convert others to our way of life and managed to get two other couples to join us down the rabbit hole. This cache is actually rated 1.5, but we had read the logs (which often contain spoilers) so we had a pretty good idea of what and where it was, so it turned into a 1. Neither Donna nor I found the cache, Rita did. It was literally, the title of this post, and all there was room for was the rolled up paper log. Because we are still novices at this we learned one of the hard and fast rules of geocaching, bring a pen. The only person who had one was Rita’s husband Larry, but it has been traveling, unused, for several years in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing, so was not the best, but we skipped our names and date on the paper. After re-hiding the cache Rudy and Patti (couple #2) had time constraints, so they hightailed it back to Augusta.

Larry & Rita had no other real plans, so they came along with us to tackle the hard one, Historic Fob. Because of the description we knew we needed to visit the courthouse, so we ignored the coordinates for the parking and just found a spot on the street right there. There were 8 questions that the answers to made up the places after the decimal point in the minutes of the coordinates. A couple were head scratchers and one must have been interpreted differently than the four of us did, but an educated guess as to the misinterpretation and we headed to the hiding place of the cache (right across the street from the courthouse.) That’s went it went from bad to worse. The GPS lead us right to one side of the park right near where the Public Works department was working on a water meter or something, a hole in the ground that looked like it had been there awhile. We were there awhile too looking and poking and poking and looking, but with no success. We were disappointed, but shrugged it off because right there at the top of the directions it mentioned that you possibly might not find it.

There was another cache less than a quarter mile away, the Brown Fob, so the four us started walking. We cut through an alley and with about 500 feet to go came to an empty lot and when we looked through it and across the street all four of us simultaneously knew exactly where to find it.

Plugging in the numbers for the fourth, and last cache in Waynesboro, turns out it was 1.17 miles to the south of where we were standing. It was a nice day, so we opted to take a walk. We walked and walked and walked and I checked the GPS, .56 miles left. We walked some more and some more and I checked the GPS and it said .53 miles left. Walk, walk, walk, .49 miles left. The group told me to stop checking or we’d never get there. We walked and walked and walked and we walked so far that we came across the restaurant the Miata Club had had breakfast in. I checked the GPS and it said .36 miles, now we are getting closer. There was some bad news though, the directional arrow was now pointed perpendicular to our southerly route and it was aiming right at the lake the Lakeview Restaurant sits on.

I checked the map and sure enough we in the same situation Donna and I were in last week in the woods, a really long walk to get to the cache after we had already been on a really long walk. The four of us agreed the best thing to do would be turn around, walk the 3/4 mile back the cars and drive to find the the Red Fob. It turned out to be an easy find, only one u-turn required, and because it is still winter so the patch of woods it is hidden in was still barren of leaves.