This is what the Purple Whale looks like reflected in the side of a tanker truck, possibly carrying Black Oil, on one of Eisenhower’s Interstate Highways. Early this morning, somewhere not too far from Aiken the Sonata’s digital odometer blipped past the 9,000 mile mark.
We searched for a total of 10 caches today and found 7, while DNFing 3. Those finds were very productive though, as they did net 7 GA Counties, 2 GA Delorme pages and one State Park.
A very cool little roadside park along the Cherokee Foothills National Scenic Highway in upstate South Carolina that we stopped at on Saturday. It is where we found one of the 15 geocaches we found during our three day trip to the SMH for Turkey Day.
An excerpt from the page of one of the caches we hunted for:
All five of the caches are placed on two Duke Power service roads. Private vehicles other than employees and company suppliers are not allowed behind the yellow gate even though it will be open on week days. Do NOT climb on top of Carl?s Worm (large black water flume). At no time do you have to leave the service roads more than eight to ten feet to locate the caches.
Carl has been the keeper of the worm for the last 30 years. We met Carl on the road and he was gracious enough to answer many questions that we had about the big black water flume. Carl has maintained the new worm since it went in service in 1990 and previously maintained the old worm starting in 1974.
Water flume history as we remember it: The original water flume went in operation carrying water from Lake Summit to the Pot Shoals power plant in 1919 the same year that High Bridge was started. The original flume was made with Cyprus and the inside diameter is 7 feet and varies with expansion and contraction. The flume starts at the Lake Summit Dam in Tuxedo and is one mile long ending in a large water tank. The flume itself is always full of water.
The new Flume which went in operation in 1990 is made from Canadian Hemlock and has an expectancy of ten more years of service. The reason for the change from Cyprus to hemlock was cost. The Canadian Hemlock costs about 1/3 as much as the Cyprus.
The water in the tank is controlled by the hydro plant operators and is cut off when Lake Summit reaches a certain level. When the water leaves the tank it splits into two 5 inch lines and drops vertically for .25 miles to the Pot Shoals Electrical Plant. Each of the 5 inch flumes turn a turbine and can be shut off independently relative to the need for power or the level of lake Summit.
We set out this morning to complete the last five of that pesky Risk series of geocaches. We found 2 of the three that we DNF’d last weekend and fortunately the information we needed to find the two final caches was not in the one we couldn’t find. To find these four caches we were gone from 8 AM until 3 PM and traveled 190 miles by car and 3-1/2 by foot. I’d really like to find that last one to say we got all 47, but I’m not so sure that it bothers me enough to go back and try again.
One of the ones we did find was near the August Canal head gates and that is where the photo above was taken.
Started the morning with a trip to Wrens, GA with the MMC for breakfast at Peggy’s. We had two different women help serve us our food, I don’t know if either was the restaurant’s namesake, but neither looked anything like Capital One’s customer service rep. After eats everyone went home.
We just took the loooooong way, 286 miles. First, we continued south on US 1 all the way to Santa Claus, GA to check on our cache (it was fine.) Then we worked our way back northeast on rural back roads carefully avoiding Statesboro (Alabama was playing Georgia Southern.) We crossed back into SC on US 301 and stopped at a new green way trail that was created out of old 301. There were six caches along the one mile “road” (we could only find 4 of them.) The trail ends partway across the Savannah River where the retired swing bridge used to meet the road.
I know it was nowhere near that many, but sometimes it feels like that when you are walking in circles, kicking over leaves, looking for and not finding a cache.
We set out this morning with a list of the 13 geocaches left in the 47 cache Risk Series. Those were all that were loaded in the GPSr so we couldn’t get distracted by other near by hides. We were out for 9 hours, walked almost 4 miles, drove almost 150 miles and found 8. There were 3 DNFs and 2 we couldn’t even attempt. One, the final cache, World Domination, we were lacking 3 numbers in the coordinates. Those 3 numbers would be found inside the other cache titled, Capture The Flag. We couldn’t find that one because its coordinates were wholly located inside a random cache in the series and it must be one of the three we couldn’t find today. Maybe next weekend…
Yesterday was a car-less day as we rode the tandem to work and when we got home we just stayed inside for the rest of the evening. The temperature Friday morning was anywhere between 35 and 38 depending on which weather source you believed. Whichever one it was we know it was down right cold bike riding in. The only thing that got really cold were our hands, which prompted a stop at a bike store in Augusta to buy some winter cycling gloves.
The Emperor passed through the 124,000 mile mark not long after leaving the garage for our trip this morning.
Volkswagen revamped its Beetle model making it lower, wider, less rounded and dropped the dash vase in an effort to appeal more to men. Way to go VW! And offering it in baby blue will really help bring in the male buyers as well. There was one other of the new New Beetles on the lot we parked in while geocaching today, it was painted in another favorite guy color, light yellow.
We traveled to Brazil, China, Indonesia, Japan, Madagascar, Ontario & Yakutsk before getting lost in Mongolia and calling it quits for the day.
