Sign on the wall outside a Breakers, a convenience store, near Marion, SC.
Four for four on Friday. Thirteen for 14 with one change of heart on Saturday and we can cross off 4 more counties and four more DeLorme pages.
Burned up almost a full tank of gas and drove around 300 miles just to find an ammo can hidden near the Museum of Western York County. We found 7 others today, but the Museum was the real objective, you see, it is located on Page 20 of the DeLorme atlas of South Carolina.
Tonight after entering all the data and running the macro that produces the image on the Challenge Page appears broke. It showed we only had 3 pages completed, a far cry from the actual 34 we have done. I updated GSAK the other day and when it did it gave a warning about backing up your database because it was going to be making big changes. Those changes must have hosed something in the macro.
Because we drove all that way just to fill the square, I manually photoshopped the image and hacked the HTML to make it look like it should. Only then did I think that maybe I should check the forums to see if the macro had been updated, it had. At least I’ll be ready for the next square.
We were gone for 12 hours, basically from dawn to dusk. A couple miles out of Aiken the Emperor passed by the 103,000 mile mark. Drove 325 miles total, probably 45 with the top down, and spent $22.50 on gas. We ate breakfast at Hardee’s, lunch at Jack’s Cosmic Dogs and dinner was chicken salad sandwiches Donna had made and we took with us. Walked around 2-1/2 miles of the West Ashley Greenway. We found 12 caches (a personal best) and DNF’d 2 (pretty much average.) Crossed off Charleston County and Pages 59, 60 & 61 from our South Carolina Challenges.
So were the hot dogs worth the trip? Yes and no. They were My-T-Fine and if I’m ever in the neighborhood again I’ll definitely stop by and try another variety, but I probably wouldn’t hop in the car drive straight there, eat a dog and drive right home.
How far would you drive for a hot dog for lunch? 135 miles? We would.
Saturday we are going to take a road trip to Mt. Pleasant, SC to visit Jack’s Cosmic Dogs. Now the timing of our trip may be a mistake, this place was recently featured on the Food Network’s The Best Thing I Ever Ate (which is the reason we are going), so there might be a crowd, but after driving that far we will probably even wait a bit before giving up.
You know now that I look, if we were to swap the rotation of our loop, we could hit a second place featured in the same show, a BBQ place in Orangeburg. But we won’t be doing that, we’ll just save that for another day.
Of course we will be doing some geocaching too. I’ve picked out almost 40 along the route, but 3/4 of them are if we feel like it on the way there and back. The important ones will be in the middle around Charleston where we hope to get 3 Delorme pages and 1 county for the SC Challenges.
Geocaching By The Numbers:
1 New County
1 Tank of Gas
2 DeLorme Pages
2 Bags of Lance’s Peanuts
6 Caches Found Today
8 Hours Away From Home
247 Miles Driven
303 Total Caches Found So Far
It came down in buckets all morning, so we watched some DVDs to pass the time, TDTVS Season 5 Episodes 2 & 3 and Disc 1 of Series 1 of an English police show called Blue Murder.
About mid afternoon we couldn’t bear to stay inside any longer and hopped in the car with GPS in hand. There were several new caches on the north side of town that were begging to be found. And we found 6 of the seven attempted. One was in a magnetic key holder, another in a Jack Daniels bottle, three in small gargoyle statues and another in plastic potato. The one we missed must have been hidden using a Romulan Cloaking Device.
Tomorrow a road trip is planned to continue our state challenges. We are aiming to fill a couple of holes by bagging the elusive Sumter County and DeLorme Pages 45 & 47.
Returned from home Florida today in a marathon 13 hour 607 mile drive, making 8 pit stops along the way. Two for meals, one for a snack, two for gas and 3 just for driver changes. Somewhere south of Orlando the Emperor passed through the 101,000 mile mark. Total mileage for the trip – 1608 miles.
We are always careful about checking for Clemson home football games before heading into the SC upstate, but completely forgot to check for a University of Florida game before planning our route home. We were “forced” off of I-75 near Ocala by the rapidly multiplying Gator fans on their way to the game. Turns out it was for the better though, as we got to retrace some of our route down along some fantastic rural central Florida roads in the opposite direction.