Bread Crumbs

While out caching in September one of our finds was called Bread Crumbs #2. I knew it was part of a series of caches from my reading of the description:

I designed the Bread Crumbs series #1-6 to lead cachers from North Augusta to Greenwood or Greenwood to North Augusta. In either location there are many very good caches that you can goto once you have reached which ever city you are heading for. On each container you will find clues for two finishing caches. One is in North Augusta the other is in Greenwood. you must complete the series # 1-6 in order to find either final cache. Also don’t forget my other two caches that i have along this route. One is “In the middle of nowhere”(GC1MH7R) the other is “Cachers Dash # 1″(GC1N1GB) which is another series of caches i have that leads you to a 5 stage multi cache. Good luck….kaboyd

So I alertly wrote down the snippet of coordinates that were on the cover of the container. Donna and I put it on our wish list to do the series in the future. The future turned out to be 2 months later in November. We started at Crumb #1 near Exit #1 of I-20 in North Augusta and worked our way to Greenwood. We skipped #2 because we already had that one in the bag. Each hide was well thought out with an nice spot for parking and it was just far enough into the woods so you wouldn’t be seen while you hunted. All the containers were the same, so you knew what to look for, and the route was 2-lane through almost entirely undeveloped land. The only one that gave us any problem was #6, it was slightly over 40′ from where our GPSr said GZ was, but once we had it we had all we needed to find the two final caches.

The Greenwood final cache was right up the street in a little park. As I turned into the parking area it was jam full of cars and loads people milling about. There was some sort of soccer game going on, so we opted to not even try. I backed up out of the lot and we came home, figuring we would come back in the future. The future turned out to be 2 months later in January. It was a sunny New Years Day, so we took a nice little top down drive back to Greenwood hoping there would not be a soccer game going. Turns out the place was deserted. Cool. About 400′ into the woods we found the cache. It was an odd looking container, almost looked like a miniature ships wheel with a screw off center.

We signed the log and left behind a couple of small trade items. Felt kind of weird finding a cache and not getting to log it as a find. I had searched Geocaching.com for the key words “bread crumbs”, but nothing came up in our area besides the numbers 1 through 6. And even though we wouldn’t get “credit” for either, we decided to do the North Augusta final in the future.

Last week while researching caches to do along the North Augusta Greenway, I found one at the far end from where we have been looking called, End of the trail ‘North Augusta’, and the description read:

The above coordinates are bogus.This is an unusual looking container that contains a log but byop. It is big enough for a few trade items (small) Also it is in the woods so be careful.

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This is the North Augusta end cache for my bread crumbs series # 1-6. You need the clues from each of the containers in that series to hunt this cache and the one in Greenwood.

HUH!?!? So I searched in Greenwood for something called End of the trail and sure enough there is the other one…. You do get credit for finding the final caches in the Bread Crumb series. We’ve been robbed! We have more finds than we thunk! We had a good idea on where to look for the final caches to see what date we had signed them, so we could log the finds on the web site, but knew there was no way we could find them again in a patch of woods without the actual coordinates. Trouble was after we found the two finals we tossed out the coordinates, so we will have to do #1 through #6 all over again.

Guess what we did today? Right. We set the alarm for early, ate breakfast and started out following bread crumbs. They were not too difficult to find the first time though and this time we made short work of locating each container. Park, walk a hundred feet into the woods, open the lid, grab the coordinate snippet and on to the next. We found a fly in the ointment at #3 though, the bonus cache coordinates were faded beyond recognition. The only thing I could make out was that they were for North Augusta, so we continued on to Greenwood, figuring we would worry about that little problem in the future.

There was no soccer game at the Greenwood park and after a spider web busting walk, we found the odd shaped container for the second time in 6 months. We opened it up and seeing as there was a new log, meaning no proof we had actually been here back in January, I went ahead and signed it. I’ll go online later today and log the now official find of the End of the trail ‘Greenwood’.

Because it was still early, we went over to Greenwood’s Rail to Trail where there was a series of 6 caches to look for. We started at the high numbered end and found #6, DNF’d #5, found #4, 3 & 2 before the combination of the heat, the distance left to #1 and the fact that 4 of the last 6 folks to look for it came up empty caused us to turn around and head back to the car. On the way back by we made another pass at #5 and couldn’t find it again.

Because it was such a pretty top down drive up, we drove back home via the same Bread Crumb route, but this time we had the top up and the air conditioner blasting. Donna wanted to try the North Augusta final next weekend, but I talked her into giving it try today so we could cross this series of that wish list. Bad move. It was now past 11:00 AM and it was probably above 90° and even though the North Augusta Greenway was still shaded, there was no breeze and the humidity was just as high as the temperature. We didn’t have the whole set of coordinates because of the faded Bread Crumb #3, but because both Donna and I remember finding the North Augusta final before, we figured we could spot the trail we thought it was off of and work it out. Using the trail, the degrees and the decimal portion of the minutes we had we could locate the cache. As we looked for that side trail a conversation, turned into a misunderstanding, which escalated into a DISCUSSION, stopping short of an argument, so after a half mile we did an about face and went back to the car defeated.

Because I didn’t blog about finding the North Augusta final I can’t pick out the date we did find it. And now looking back through our finds, I can’t seem to see any other found caches that would have put us any where close to the area where it should be. The only two times we cached near that end of the Greenway was in August of last year, before we even thought of doing this series. Maybe we didn’t do it. Odd.