Sonata Mileage

For whatever reason, there was gobs of traffic heading east on I-10 with us today all through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Fortunately there were no major slow-ups, except the tunnel under Mobile Bay, so we made great time, but we were always surrounded by fast moving cars and trucks. Mysteriously, traffic thinned to almost nothing once we got into Florida and past Pensacola.

But wouldn’t you know it, but as soon as we got off I-10 to hit the back roads of Florida, we ran into a convoy of farm implements crawling along at 25MPH. The roads were hilly and curvy enough that we, along with some others, were stuck behind them for about 20 minutes. We thought we caught a break in Campbellton when 2 of the three went straight and only one turned right with us staying on Florida Route 2. It was short lived though, as those two just took a different route through town and two minutes later popped back in front of us. Sigh.

We hunted only two caches today as we wanted to make big mileage, one was in Mississippi and the other was in Alabama, bringing us to having found caches in 40% of these United States.

Tonight we are staying at the same Holiday Inn Express in Bainbridge, GA as we did Monday evening on our way west. This time it is different, and not just because we are in a different room from then, but the hotel is flirting with disaster this weekend as it is where the band Molly Hatchet is staying while playing at the 1st Annual Redneck Expo & Golf Cart Rally that’s here in town.

The Purple Whale passed the 17,000 mile level near Spanish Fort, MS.

Somewhere outside Fort Gaines, Ga the Purple Whale surpassed the 16,000 mile mark. Today we visited 2 Georgia State Parks and a State Conservation Park. We scored caches in 3 GA DeLorme Map Pages and 11 Georgia Counties. Along the road today we spotted a fox squirrel, a turtle and a field mouse. We also spotted Jesus carrying a cross and a naked lady with a lizard in her hair.

The return trip from the Land of Orange Trees was an adventure. First I forgot to create a pocket query for the three remaining counties we wanted to get in south Georgia. Then we couldn’t find free Wi-Fi anywhere for me to get online to make one. When we did find free wi-fi at Mickey D’s the charge on the laptop battery was so low it was insufficient to get the query information downloaded to the GPSr and PDA.

We walked over to a Cracker Barrel from McDonalds for lunch and as we were led to a table Donna asked if there was one near an outlet (so we could charge up the laptop.) The hostess made a sharp left and seated us across the room from where she was original intending to place us. This turned out to be a little good, wall plug, and very bad, because when our waitress arrived with Donna’s water and my sweet tea she promptly spilled both big glasses on the table and on me. Donna didn’t get wet, but I got a kind of wet/damp on one sleeve and both upper pant legs.

After the pre lunch “bath”, things were nothing but better, as we were now out of Florida, off the awful Interstate and onto the beautiful back roads of Georgia. But first, one of the caches we needed (Lowndes County) was within walking distance of the Cracker Barrel. As a bonus it turned out that not only did it satisfy the county, but was also worth a needed Delorme page.

Cache number two, which was for Lanier County, took us to the lovely small town of Lakeland, GA. The “Welcome To” proclaimed it was the the Georgia’s Historic Mural City. On our circuitous route through town on GA135 we didn’t see any murals…until we crossed Main Street where we noticed a lot of folks dressed up and several Model A Fords parked. We quickly parked, jumped out and walked towards the excitement. They were filming something with the towns folks posing near a building with one of the murals. We asked a couple of the locals who were watching like we were, but didn’t get a real solid answer. Once the thing broke up we wandered around a bit found a few of the apparently many interesting murals.

The last cache we found counted for Atkinson County and was called “Willacoochee Choo Choo” and I’ll let my geocaching.com log do the talking here:

Just from the title I was worried about this one. Little Red Cabooses are our kryptonite and we had already lucked out and found one on this trip, so I just knew we would never find this one! Thanks for this not being a magnetic key holder stuck somewhere on the thousands of square feet of metal on the undercarriage of a train car.

It was just a plain ol’ 35mm film canister well integrated into the environment.

Well, we are 1/13^th of the way there after today. Our 1,000^th find came in the town of Eastman, GA at a historical home that is now a museum, open only by appointment. The find happened in typical fashion, the GPSr led us to the base of a tree with a nice bit of shrubbery all around its base, the perfect spot to hide a cache, but it wasn’t there. Believe me, we tried to make it be there, we each walked all around the tree twice, separately, but it just wasn’t there. We then checked a couple of surrounding trees and bushes with the same lack of discovery. Finally I started looking under the porch of the house and there it was, thirty eight feet from GZ.

The Purple Whale passed the 13,000 mile mark some where between the 1,000 find and the town of Abbeville, GA where the above court house is.