Road Trip

The Rock House


The Rock House

We spent the whole day, and I do mean the whole day, geocaching. We were gone from 6:30 AM until 6:30 PM traveling a total of 250 miles. We had breakfast at Dunkin’ Donuts in Aiken, lunch at McDonalds in Louisville, GA and dinner at Cracker Barrel in Augusta. We found 11 caches, collecting 5 GA Counties, 2 GA DeLorme map pages and 2 GA State Parks, while DNf-ing just one. We walked a total of 6 miles, 3 in one state park, 2 in the other and 1 more chasing the rest of the caches.

There were several memorable finds, including the last one, The Rock House outside of Thomson, Georgia which was built around 1785 and is the oldest stone residence in the state of Georgia. The home is now owned by the Wrightsboro Quaker Foundation and has been rumored to be haunted. The Augusta Paranormal Society visits this location from time to time. Maybe because it was light out we didn’t see any ghosts.

The first find of the day was pretty cool too, but that is a story for another day.

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Saturday By The Numbers


High Falls State Fall State Park

397 miles driven.
13 hours away from home.
6.2 miles walked on 4 different trails.
5 caches found.
4 restaurants in Greensboro, GA that we didn’t get served dinner in.
3 meals out (AKA, The Trifecta.)
3 GA State Parks completed.
2 DNF caches.
1 cache found, but too impatient to sign the log.

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I Bet They Were Beautiful Last Week


Hey! Weren’t You Just Here Two Weeks Ago?

Why yes, we were.

Today was our annual trip to the mountains with the MMC to view the fall colors. When I emailed a reminder to the membership, I remarked that Donna and I reserved the right to cancel the event if there weren’t at least two other cars going on the trip. So guess how many showed up? Right, two. Should have picked a larger number. A couple in one of the cars had never been to see the Georgia Guidestones, so we just had to stop.

We had a route planned that went north and west in Georgia ending up in Walhalla, SC for lunch before turning around and returning south and east in South Carolina. Trouble with the plan was that we had too much time built in for rest breaks (it probably would have been just right if we had twice as many cars and the temperatures had been 15° warmer like they were supposed to be), so when we got to I-85 and about 20 minutes from Martha’s Marketplace Cafe, it was only 10:30 AM. An adjustment was made to the route that was to take us on a loop northwest to Franklin, NC before coming back into Walhalla.

We were now in the mountains and the fall colors were nice, but noticeably past peak. At a break in Clayton, GA with traffic on four lane US441 heavy, the clock past noon and the distinct possibility that the scenery would not improve we made another adjustment to the route. Someone pointed at the GA map and said, “What’s that little gray line heading due east towards SC and route 28?” GPS’s and Smarty Pants phones were consulted and it was called Warwoman Rd. I said, “Let’s go. I’ve heard Miata.net chatter about that road. And it was good.” No one complained about the lack of fall color on this stretch of the trip. As one driver put it later, “All I saw was a white line on my right and a double yellow line on my left.” Once we got back in South Carolina on Rte. 28 we hit a sweet spot of altitude and chlorophyll-less-ness making the show out the side windows quite nice for about 15 miles or so.

Lunch in Walhalla at the Brian & Donna Pre-Approved Dining Spot was very good. The only negative was the service was slow, but I got the feeling that everything that happens in Walhalla happens slow. The trip home was uneventful and because we traveled about 50 miles less than we normally do on one of these excursions we got home in daylight and at a decent time for dinner at home.

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Georgia State Parks Geo-Challenge


Georgia’s Stonehenge, just outside of Elberton.

Seeing as we have completed the South Carolina DeLorme Challenge and have in our hot little hands the coordinates for the final cache in the South Carolina County Challenge we were looking for a new adventure. The Georgia State Parks Geo-Challenge looks like a winner. There is a geocache in 42 of Georgia’s 48 State Parks and we are setting off to find them all. Today we bought a yearly pass to Georgia State Parks creating an October 31, 2011 deadline for us to finish this challenge.

Seeing as we were also scouting routes for the MMC’s Leaf Peeping run in two weeks we headed up to the northeast Georgia mountains to start the Challenge. Here is the log I wrote for our first successful find in the series:

We arrived at the park office to get a trail map and stumbled on a small group of Augusta area geocachers. We chatted for a bit then hopped in our respective cars for the drive to the cache. I headed out first with them in hot pursuit. At a fork in the road, I went right, while they, after hesitating went left. Donna and I had plugged in the trailhead parking coords and attacked it from that way. The other 4 used the “drive on the road that will take you nearest the cache” approach. Amazingly enough both teams converged on ground zero at the same time.

Using the hint, I walked right to where I suspected the ammo can would be. It wasn’t. I then did a quick 360 scan and spotted a UPS. Headed over to where I was sure the cache would be, only to be foiled again. Another horizon scan and another UPS, this better be it. On our way over there my wife tripped on a branch, falling down as a distraction, so I could make the find before the Augusta group. Way to go girl! (OK, I’m kidding about the distraction thing. But she really did take an accidental fall as we approached the cache. Total damages, a bit of wounded pride, one scraped knee and probably have a black and blue patella tomorrow.)

We all signed the log, rifled through the schwag, trading nothing, and each group dropped in a Travel Bug. The Augusta folks that needed to stamp their GA Park Geo-Challenge passport thingie did and then each group headed off in opposite directions, back off to their cars. We had left our passport back in the car, which was par for pretty much the way our day was going, so when we got back to the car, we grabbed the paper and walked back to the cache again to stamp it.

After stamping the page, yippee, one down forty-one to go, we grabbed up the TB that one of the Augusta cachers had just dropped off, to make the trip back doubly worth it. I hope the rest of the State Park finds are this interesting?

It wasn’t the first one we tried though, we missed out on the cache in Tallulah Gorge State Park, but that is a story for another day, and do I mean story.

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Like Lindsay Lohan Coming Out Of Rehab

Today’s strip of the Soxaholic centers around a couple FRS fans chatting on the phone about how now that the Sox are starting a nice home stand after a rocky road trip they should have an easier time catching Tampa and making the playoffs. In the second to the last panel one says to the other, “We’re kidding ourselves aren’t we?” The punchline in the last panel is this post’s title, “Like Lindsay Lohan coming out of rehab.”

The way they have been playing lately I haven’t been kidding myself. Often when you are watching a baseball game you can pick the winner, sometimes it is really obvious, like one team having an eight run lead, while in close games the winner can be foretold by the intangibles, line drives just squeaking by fielders or bloops landing just out of reach, etc. This can be extrapolated to whole seasons as well, and in this Red Sox season they just can’t catch a break (as long as you don’t count Jacoby Ellsbury’s ribs.) According to the math wizards over at the Baseball Prospectus, as of today, the FRS only have a 26.98664% of making the playoffs.

Today at work I verbally threatened to stop listening to them to a couple people, but I guess I’m too much of a fan to jump off the bandwagon because here I am in front of the PC listening to the WEEI broadcast. And right now I’m glad I did because they are beating the Angels 6-0 in the sixth.

Also I might have totally missed a rarity in the baseball world. If you have ever been to a minor league baseball game, invariably the PA guy will play the sound of breaking glass when a player fouls a ball out of the stadium towards the parking lot, so the crowd will think the ball broke a car window. Well tonight, Red Sox outfielder, Darnell McDonald hit a home run over the Green Monster in left field and actually did break a window in a car parked on Lansdowne Street. Quick thinking announcer Joe Castiglione, after making the home run call said, “I guess he is going to have to call 1-800-GIANT,” giving radio broadcast sponsor Giant Glass, who’s slogan is, “Who you gonna call when your windshields busted?” an extra, but very appropriate plug.

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Zombieland

This is the explanation for those of you with puzzled looks on your face over the post titles this past week.

Last Monday the FRS had a day game, so in the evening, while Donna surfed her usual cooking, home or reality shows on TV, I decided to watch a movie from my Netflix queue. This movie was there because several of my co workers had seen it and were talking it up as something I just had to see, so to appease them I added it. Now I don’t watch a lot of monster movies to begin with and zombie ones are even at the bottom of that pile, but once I got watching it though, I was hooked. And it turns out it is more of a road trip slash geeky guy wins heart of attractive female romance flick than a zombie movie. Plus nobody told me it was a comedy!

The narrator of the movie is a college student that credits his survival of the zombie apocalypse to the strict adherence of a set of rules, which is where the last 7 titles came from. Not all the rules are actually in the movie, some came from trailers and other promotional items, and the list is not complete. I guess that is why they are going to make a sequel. So we can know what Rule #5 is and #10 and so on.

01. "Cardio"
02. "Double tap"
03. "Beware of bathrooms"
04. "Wear seatbelts"
06. "Cast iron skillet"
07. "Travel light"
08. "Get a kickass partner"
12. "Bounty paper towels"
15. "Bowling Ball"
17. "(Don't) be a hero"
18. "Limber up"
21. "Avoid strip clubs"
22. "When in doubt, know your way out"
29. "The buddy system"
31. "Check the back seat"
32. "Enjoy the little things"
33. "Swiss army knife"

On a side note, I thought that the lead actor/narrator, AKA Columbus, looked familiar and it turns out I had just seen him in another movie a couple of weeks prior. The title of that movie was called Adventureland. I wonder if every movie he will be in will have somethingland in the title? And Little Miss Sunshine is growing up nicely.

As long as you don’t have a weak stomach, sorry Donna, I recommend you see Zombieland. At least once.

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Bad News Bear

We visited my sister and her husband in Hendersonville, NC yesterday afternoon and today. This morning Donna and I did a little geocaching around the Blue Ridge Community College campus. It was nice modern campus that obviously placed more emphasis on academics than on athletics comparing the buildings that house classrooms and the baseball field.

There was a cache called Bad News Bears here.

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