Ducks On The Water

The lower lake in Barnwell State Park.

Started down, went went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1110

HI-SPY

At Stage 2 you?ll find a device that is meant for public use, but sounds like something the CIA might have ordered from our neighbors to the north.

🙂 BTR & D2! found [Multi-cache] Mitchellville Beach Park on Saturday, 28 January 2012

We DNF’d this one way back on October 24, 2009. I get a grin reading our log from then as we took several opportunities to make this a very hard “simple three-stage cache.”

This time we knew how to get to stage two the right way and apparently we got our math right too, as we found the final with ease.

Thanks for the cache and this time we enjoyed a nice walk on the beach for all the right reasons.

SE 107.3 mi from your home location

Honey

I had this joke emailed to me and though it would be a cute little space filler:

Several days ago as I left work, I desperately gave myself a personal TSA pat down. I was looking for my keys. They were not in my pockets. A quick search of my cubical revealed nothing.

Suddenly I realized, I must have left them in the car. Frantically, I headed for the parking lot. My wife has scolded me many times for leaving the keys in the ignition, but my theory is the ignition is the best place not to lose them. Her theory is that the car will be stolen. As I burst through the doors of the church, I came to a terrifying conclusion. Her theory was right. The parking lot was empty.

I immediately call the police. I gave them my location, confessed that I had left my keys in the car, and that it had been stolen. Then I made the most difficult call of all, “Honey,” I stammered, I always call her “honey” in times like these, “I left my keys in the car, and it has been stolen.”

There was a period of silence. I thought the call had been dropped, but then I heard my wife?s voice. “Honey,” she replied, she always calls me “honey” in times like these. “I dropped you off!” Now it was my time to be silent. Embarrassed, I said, “Well, come and get me.”

Her reply, “I will, as soon as I convince this policeman I have not stolen your car!”

Happy Groundhog Day

If you believe in that sort of thing, according to the prognosticating woodchuck Punxsutawney Phil, we are in for 6 more weeks of winter. Well I say, “Big whup.” If the weather in the next six weeks is anything like it has been for the last six, bring it on. For the second week in a row the Miata has been our car of choice for the commute to work. For the last four days we have had the top down on the ride home for all of them and today we even drove to work with it down.

How come one of those second tier cable channels (cough, cough, USA, cough, cough) don’t run a 24 hour marathon of the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day movie on this day every year?

Started down, went went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1108

Mileage Matters

The Purple Whale joined our automotive stable at the end of last April, approximately 9 months ago, and since then we have put 12,000 miles on it.

From the time the Emperor was new in November of 2003 until the Sonata showed up in April 2011, a total of 7 years and 5 months, we drove it, our only car, for 120,000 miles. If you break that down into miles per 9 month period it comes to a little bit over 12,000 miles.

So on the surface it looks like our driving habits haven’t changed much, 12k miles around every 9 months, but not really. The Miata, in that same April 2011 to January 2012 time frame, has also been driven 5,000 miles. This means our cars have been driven 17,000 in the past nine months. And it is not because I’m driving one car and Donna is driving the other, when one car is moving the other is parked.

I guess I’m going to have to go back and read this blog for that time period and see if we have traveled more than normal.

Started down, went went up, back down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1106

12,000 Men in Blue and Gray

On the way back from HHI we grabbed a cache in another State Park in the Sandhills Challenge, Rivers Bridge.

Easy walk to the cache. We swapped out a couple SC Parks items for a couple of McToys and a coveted South of the Border bumper stickers.

After finding the cache we walked the mile straight trail to visit the battlefield. I guess because we are close to the anniversary of the actual February 2nd & 3rd battle there were a group a Civil War re-enacters touring the site as well. We stopped and listened as one gentleman read a letter from a Confederate survivor of the battle.

Thanks for bringing us here.

On February 2, 1865, a Confederate force under Maj. Gen. Lafayette McLaws held the crossings of the Salkehatchie River against the advance of the right wing of Sherman?s Army. Federal soldiers began building bridges across the swamp to bypass the road block. In the meantime, Union columns worked to get on the Confederates? flanks and rear. On February 3, two Union brigades waded the swamp downstream and assaulted McLaws?s right. McLaws retreated toward Branchville after stalling Sherman?s advance for only one day.

Although historically not a large battle, the Battle at River’s Bridge was significant because it is the last defensive effort of the Confederates against the march of Sherman’s army to Columbia. Actually, only in total, approximately 6,200 soldiers were involved in this battle – 5,000 Union soldiers, and 1,200 Confederate. 262 men were killed – 92 Union and 170 Confederate.

Somewhere on I-95 North this morning the Purple Whale passed over the 12,000 mile mark.

This Looks Familiar

Donna and I have criss-crossed the state of South Carolina several times. First just to get acquainted when we moved here, then chasing every post office in the state and more recently searching for geocaches in every county and on every DeLorme page. There is hardly a SC numbered highway tat we haven’t traveled, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that we had been to Lake Warren State Park before, but it did.

We had even walked the entirety of the nature trail before on a previous journey. This time we were here for the Caches, of which there were two. One cache, the one we were really there after, one our current obsession, the Sandhills Regional Challenge, was on a small loop trail near the lake. The second was on the previously mentioned nature trail. The Sandhills Challenge was was a quick find, but the Savannah’s Tin Hat Treasure was another story:

Our GPSr has been giving us fits recently. I think the Electronic Compass is affecting the directional arrow, when following the arrow to caches it has a tendency to suddenly point askew, while the distance slowly ticks down correctly. When using the map feature the pointer that represents our direction does the same thing. Twisty trails don’t help at all. This has us wandering in circles quite a bit.

This trek was a fine example, we ended up getting turned around several times and when our distance got down below 300′ we charged into the woods bushwhacking away, figuring it was our only chance. Fortunately the water level was winter low or we probably would have gotten our feet wet.

We made the find and took a McToy Panda Bear while leaving a bunny and a South of the Border bumper sticker. We walked the opposite way we came in, thereby stumbling on the trail a mere 40′ away from GZ. We walked in the direction we thought would take us back to where we parked, but as it turned out we found the trail end where the bench overlooking the pond is. Dang, the trail is not a loop and we had turned the wrong way. We could see our car, it was so close, but there was no way to get to it except to retrace the entire trail back. Meh, not us, I lead another bushwhacking expedition towards the road I could see. Probably would have been shorter to go back on the trail…we managed to turn what probably is a 1 mile walk into double that.

Thanks for the cache!

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1104