May 26, 2015

• Seeking and Finding, Continued

  On Friday morning, we planned to drive down to southern Maryland, stopping at the Thomas Stone National Historic Site before continuing to St. Mary's City. First, however, I wanted to make a quick detour to a rest area just over the state line in West Virginia. I'd done some research before we left and it appeared there were a few really good caches in the rest area, which was only eight miles from our hotel. I hadn't told Brett my plan yet, but by a quirk of fate he met a geocaching couple from our our area in the hotel lobby before I made it there for breakfast and they told him we shouldn't miss those caches. So off we went to West Virginia to add that state to our geocaching map and see these caches everyone was talking about.

  One of the caches was an Earth Cache, which is not a physical cache, but a location with some sort of earth history attached. Usually the lesson is included on the cache page and there are some questions you have to answer (to prove you were actually at the location) before you can claim the cache. This one was at a water garden.

  

  One of the caches was a simple "tupperware in the woods" cache. The rest area was crawling with geocachers in town for GeoWoodstock and bikers headed to DC for Rolling Thunder. The geocachers were doing GeoWoodstock type caching; somebody finds the cache and a line of cachers forms behind them waiting to sign the log. The log book gets passed from hand to hand along with instructions on where the cache should be replaced. It's not really very fun to geocache that way. The third cache was one that we managed to get to when nobody else was around it. It was a typical looking birdhouse, except a crescent moon had been carved in the front, turning it into a miniature outhouse. When we opened the door, this is what we saw:

  

  The cache container was inside the outhouse, but I won't tell where. The final cache was a gadget cache. It was another birdhouse with a combination padlock attached and we had to figure out the combination to get the cache. There was a crowd of people around this cache and they were making no headway, so we decided to skip it and maybe come back later to give it a try.

  

  When we got back to the van, we entered the address of the Thomas Stone house in our car GPS and it said it would take two hours to get there, and we found it would take another hour to get to St. Mary's City. We had planned to spend a couple of hours at the Thomas Stone house and maybe three or four hours in St. Mary's City. If we did that, then drove three hours back to the site of GeoWoodstock, we would miss the pre-event Meet & Greet. So we ditched our plans and all of my geocache research and went instead to the Civil War battlefield at Antietam, West Virginia.

  

  We'd been there before and it was just as pretty and peaceful as I remembered it. We stopped at the visitor center and ended up purchasing a National Parks pass good for a year, which should come in handy when we take our big cross country road trip in September. We visited the Dunker Church and looked around a bit of the battlefield, then decided to mosey over to Harper's Ferry, one of my favorite places.

  With our new park pass, we were able to get into the National Park Visitor Center for free, park in the lot and take a shuttle bus down into the town. Our first priority was lunch. We found a BBQ joint with "patio" dining. The patio appeared to be the open basement of a long gone building that used to sit behind the restaurant. We ate outside in a basement, with the street a flight of stairs up from us.

  

  After lunch, we walked over to a footpath (actually part of the Appalachian Trail) that led to a railroad bridge over the C&O Canal. We walked across the canal on the pedestrian path attached to the railroad bridge. Even though it was probably not much more than a mile round trip, I can now say I've hiked on part of the Appalachian Trail.

  

  Next, Brett wanted to hike up to Jefferson Rock, above the Catholic church. I looked at the map we'd received at the Visitor Center and decided there was no way my knees could handle that hike, so I handed Brett my camera and went to the bookstore while he hiked up to the church and beyond.

   

  I think I made a wise choice. Brett enjoyed the view, but he was panting and sweating by the time he made it back down to the bookstore where I was waiting with a handful of postcards and a cold bottle of water.

  Since we were so close to Virginia, we thought it would be a darn shame to not add that state to our geocaching map, so when we left Harper's Ferry, we headed to a little town just over the state line. The first cache we tried for must have been disabled because when we couldn't find it I tried to pull up the details on my phone app and the link wouldn't work. That usually means the cache has been disabled for some reason. The second cache we tried for was a high difficulty rating. It was on the dining deck outside a pizza place. We looked for a while and I'm pretty sure we located the hiding place, but hadn't yet penetrated the camouflage when somebody wandered out of the restaurant with a plate of food and sat down to eat. For our third attempt at a Virginia cache, we went to an old church with a cemetery behind it.

  

  Cemetery caching is not the best idea on Memorial Day weekend, as the cemeteries tend to be unusually busy at that time of year, especially when there are veterans going all the way back to the Revolutionary War whose graves must be marked with little U.S. flags. We managed to dodge the flag crew with their clipboard and hundred or more flags and finally found a cache.

  During all our wandering around three states, we wondered whether murisopsis and Old Dog Sparky had arrived in Hagerstown yet. We thought we would all be in the same hotel, but when murisopsis called, she said they were actually booked in the Hampton Inn across town from the one where we were staying. She also told me with a quaver in her voice that they had missed the deadline to register for GeoWoodstock. Not that you have to be registered to attend, but you have to be registered to purchase anything from their online store, and everything from their store sells out by the time GeoWoodstock rolls around. I knew what the problem was. Murisopsis loves pathtags, little coin-sized metal medallions with artwork on them. Brett and I each had pathtags for trading at GeoWoodstock. I'm not gifted in drawing, but if I have a concept, Brett can make the design. Here are examples of pathtags.

   

  At some point, a GeoWoodstock planning committee realized the fundraising possibilities of pathtags and they started offering an official event pathtag with each registration, and selling a set of six pathtags depicting iconic images of the area where the festival is being held each year. For some reason, I felt compelled to order two sets of pathtags when I registered Brett and myself, so I was able to give murisopsis the extra set of six, and since Brett doesn't collect them (he'd designed the Waldo one for fun and gave them to me to trade), he gave her the one that came with his registration.

  There were also game sheets in the registration packet, including a Bingo card for the ice breaker. We had to fill up the card completely by getting signatures of geocachers (only one per cacher) for different scenarios. For instance, I could sign the box that said, "Required medical assistance while geocaching," or the one that said, "Got your vehicle stuck in mud or snow while geocaching." Murisopsis could sign the box that said, "Took a picture of a bear or bobcat while geocaching." She was helping me get signatures because I was slowed down by trading pathtags along the way. At some point during all the handing of papers back and forth for signatures, I ended up with an extra blank Bingo card and murisopsis happily took it as her own and began to get it filled in. We had a lot of fun, met a lot of people, and the next morning we both got the last squares in our cards filled ("Live outside the USA") and dropped them in the box for a prize drawing later that day. Neither of us won, but playing Geocacher Bingo is always a highlight of GeoWoodstock for me.

  This post has gotten pretty long, so I'll continue our adventures tomorrow.

  • 7:44 pm
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