A very cool little roadside park along the Cherokee Foothills National Scenic Highway in upstate South Carolina that we stopped at on Saturday. It is where we found one of the 15 geocaches we found during our three day trip to the SMH for Turkey Day.
After a weekend off, we are back in the mountains again, this time the Georgia & North Carolina ones. We drove up to Hendersonville to see my sister and her husband at the SMH. For the first time in a long time we didn’t eat lunch at West One, but instead ate at Hannah Flanagan’s, where everybody’s Irish. While we are on this trip we are also doing wee bit of geocaching. Nabbed a couple of state parks, a couple of counties and a DeLorme page.
We took a half a day off from work and drove up to North Carolina to retrieve our extra sheets and towels from the SMH and do a little leaf peeping. Early on in the drive we noticed that in the lower elevations in SC there were quite a few trees already changed and a lot that already dropped their leaves. We both thought that this would mean that as we got into the mountains everything would be dull and empty, but boy were we wrong. Along I-26 in the upstate of SC the trees were in peak color and as we got into the higher elevations of NC they were still plenty colorful.
Now that we are here the weather has turned against us. In the beginning of the week it looked like rain so we were hesitant, but as the week progressed the fore cast looked better. Yesterday when we made the reservation the chance of rain on Saturday was down to 20%. It is actually misting and wet that we are here and if you check the forecast for tomorrow in the SC upstate they are calling for a 70% of rain.
We have several caches mapped out do to for our challenges in the morning on the way home, we will just have to see how it turns out in the morning. Rain we head straight home, misty we cache until damp, dry we rack ’em up.
We were treated to a nice sunrise from the second floor deck of the SMH. Grabbed a couple shoots through the screen on the porch and this is one that the camera didn’t actually focus on the screen (I didn’t even think that it could focus on something that close.)
The rest of the day was spent wandering around the back roads near Hendersonville with no particular destination in mind, but to capture a few of the 400 some odd caches within 25 miles of H-town that I have loaded into the GPS. Snagged a half dozen of them. The leaves are just starting to change around here, perhaps 20% or so are now yellow, orange or red which made the rural roads twinkle in brief flashes of color as we zipped down them.
My sister and her husband arrived at their southern home around mid-afternoon and we spent several hours catching up over dinner and a UCONN football game on ESPN. We didn’t see the sunset, but on our evening walk we were treated to some interesting reddish clouds.
Like the last time we met them here in late July, we spent one night at the SMH and then vacated the place so Allen’s sister and her husband could spend the night there. Like last time, they weren’t supposed to get to the townhouse until later. In July we left in the early afternoon and missed them, this time we hung around until about 8 PM and they still hadn’t showed up. We are getting together with Diane and Allen in the morning for breakfast at a local restaurant and we asked if the sister and brother-in-law would be joining us, but he laughed and said, not that early. 8:15AM? The last (and first) time we saw his sister and her husband was at Diane and Allen’s wedding about 20 years ago. My paranoid side is now convinced they are avoiding us.
We only worked a half day and after lunch at home we hit the road to the SMH. We grabbed three caches on the way up and had our first DNF in three weeks behind an abandoned shopping center in north Spartanburg.
Instead of driving the whole way from Newberry on I-26 as usual, after the miss in Spartanburg Donna let me finish the trip on US176 which parallels I-26 to Hendersonville, but is a lot more scenic and more of a Miata road – read windy, twisty, switchbacky.
Guess what we had for dinner? Right. Pizza at West One in H-ville. We opted for a change of flavor and went for the prosciutto pie. This is the third variety of pizza we have tried here and we are both hard pressed to pick a favorite.
We came back from the SMH via US25 instead of the Interstate and snagged a few caches on the way.
The eight finds put us over the two hundred mark, 202 to be exact.
We crossed off three counties, Greenville, Laurens & Greenwood, bringing us to 17 of 46 completed in that challenge.
Plus we filled in 3 DeLorme pages, 17, 18 & 33 meaning we are now finished with 14 of 47 pages.
We also crossed off the letter X from the SC Alphabet Challenge leaving us needing only J & Z to complete the 26 needed for that one.
It was a quiet and rainy day here at the SMH. We were up early enough to get the lot mowed and give a bad haircut to the hedge in front of the porch (before picture to left) before the rain started.
We didn’t get in any caching because we are not hard core enough, a little (and it was not always little) bit of precipitation scared us away.
So we stayed inside and watched all of Disc 5 of Season 7 of West Wing this afternoon and we now have just the very last 3 episodes to watch. We are still not sure what we are going to replace it with in our TV rental queue, quite possibly nothing.
After West Wing I spent the next three hours watching the FRS lose to the Yankees again. I know the games don’t really mean anything standing wise, we’re not catching them for the division and we have a lock on the wildcard, but if they don’t at least win tomorrow I’m going to have to take an incredible amount of grief at work on Monday from my manager…