Geocaching

Crooked River


The sun reflects off the Crooked River as viewed from the Georgia State Park of the same name. Six caches, five counties, one DeLorme page and one GA State Park.

5,000 Train Cars


We originally thought that when we returned from out west, we would use the remaining days of the week on vacation to go Georgia State Park geocaching. Then, while we were on vacation, we thought we might just go back to work on Thursday & Friday, to save the vacation days for use at another time. Well, we ended up going with Plan A.

Spent about 15 minutes with a couple of train enthusiasts chatting railroading while we waited for a train to pass by here at the Folkston (GA) Funnel – From Wikipedia – With virtually all rail traffic headed to Florida passing through Folkston, the rail lines through the city have acquired the nickname “The Folkston Funnel”. As many as 60 trains a day pass through Folkston heading into and out of Florida, which some years draws ten times as many railfans as people who live in the city. To provide for a safe (and advantageous) viewing situation, the town has followed the example of another high-density rail town, Rochelle, Illinois, and has built a platform for visitors, along with picnic tables, chairs, BBQ pits, restrooms, and grills. And at night, lights shine from the platform onto the double rail so if someone wanted to, he or she could watch after sunset. Trains that come from the north move south toward Savannah, go through the Folkston Funnel, and arrive in Jacksonville. Trains that come from Florida do the same, just the opposite direction. At the covered viewing platform, there is an active scanner running and visitors can listen to train engineers as they run the trains through. As of 2006, there is also free WiFi for laptop users.

The Purple Wale passes 5,000 miles somewhere near Dublin, GA. We find 8 geocaches in 6 different counties, also fill in 3 DeLorme pages and snag 1 State Park.

The Trail With No Name

The trail this photo was taken on goes from the Mange to Rabbit Valley crossing several major thoroughfares in the woods, including Pioneer Trail, yet it has no designation of its own. I like to call it the Clint Eastwood Trail.

We did in fact go find the new cache in Hitchcock Woods this morning, but we didn’t just park, walk to, find and leave of course, we took the long way. The temperature was in the middle 70s, but the humidity felt higher and by the time we were done with our 3-3/4 mile walk my T-shirt looked like I had been running from the “Others” along with Jack, Kate and Hurley. It was a very nice walk and I think we saw or heard more woodpeckers eating breakfast than we saw humans.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Tran?si?tions since 10/24/08: 1056

Embarassment of Caches

In a couple weeks we are heading out west to Snohomish, WA to visit Donna’s brother and his family. We are spending a little more than 2 days with them before we go on a road trip that will include western Washington, western Oregon, the tip of coastal California and back up the Oregon coast before flying home out of Seattle.

We will, of course, be doing some geocaching. The Seattle area is the birthplace of geocaching which means that there are more caches out there than you can shake a GPSr at. Our first day of traveling is from Snohomish to White Salmon, WA on the Hood River. As we are prone to do, we are not taking the most direct route, but the scenic one by going through Steven’s Pass before heading south. Google maps says it is 300 miles and that is the upper limit of what we like to drive in a day, so there is not going to be a lot of time for geocaching.

I did a Pocket Query of caches along the middle 230 miles of our route, extending to a maximum of one mile either side and it returned 334 finds! Donna and I have been taking turns trying to whittle that number of caches down, with our criteria being: convenient to the direction of travel on the route, not too difficult and be somewhat scenic. So far we have managed to get it down to 217 and it really needs to be more in the neighborhood of 30. We are obviously going to be leaving a ton of terrific hides off our To Do List and from the descriptions I’ve been reading we could spend our entire week and a half out ther just hiking the trails and geocaching along this one day’s drive. We are not too saddened by this development, as the journey is always the reason, any geocaching is just a bonus.

Closer to home, there is a new cache in Hitchcock Woods, the replacement for our just archived cache “The Birds”, called “North by Northwest” that we will probably go hunting for tomorrow.

Gone Fishing

I captured these two people fishing under the I-20 bridge that crosses the Savannah River while we were out fishing on land for ammo cans. It a very hazy morning so that the original was very high key, so I ran it through an HDR program and chose Ultra contrast. Click on the image above to see the original.

How Low Can You Go

We went on a Georgia Geocaching run today. We needed to check on our cache in Santa Claus because of a recent DNF and while we were out, take a route to capture 4 nearby counties of Georgia’s 159 total.

Neither one of us could figure out how we had hid a cache in Toombs county (Santa Claus) without having a find there. So our first stop of the day was to change that. We found LIFE’S A GAME, HAVE FUN! in a park in the town of Lyons. Next stop was to check on the DNF’d cache. Usually one person not finding a cache is not a concern, but the folks who couldn’t find it had over 1,600 finds, so they probably should have found it. The cache was right where we put it last December. That’s the thing with geocaching, no matter how many you have found, you can still get stumped by an occasional easy one.

In some of these small rural counties pickings can be slim, so we only had a total of 11 caches on our list along the route through all 4 counties. One county only has two caches total and we really started sweating badly after we DNF’d the first one we attempted. It was all I could do to talk Donna into looking for the second one because in is #2 on our Most Hated Style Hide List, the guardrail magnetic (the lamp post skirt hide is #1.) We had kind of a rough day, 4 finds and 3 DNFs, but we made the four count, one in each of the counties we wanted.

I don’t know exactly how many miles we traveled today, because I didn’t reset an odometer, but the Google Maps loop I did last night said 268 miles. When we got in the Purple Whale this morning the nifty miles to empty meter read just over 250 miles and the gas gauge was reading one segment over half a tank. We figured we might have to buy a gallon or two of gas in Georgia so we could make it back to the Kroger in Aiken to take advantage of the $1 a gallon off we earned by buying a stove. As the day wore on it looked more and more like we might make it home without having to pay the higher price for gas in Georgia.

We figured we were home free when the miles to empty read 80 miles and the sign said Augusta 41 because Aiken is only, at most 25 miles from Augusta. When the low fuel light came on as we entered the southern part of Augusta I was unconcerned as I figured that meant we had a couple gallons left which was more than enough to make it back. At about 5 miles from Kroger, the Miles To Empty display flat-lined. The last number I remember seeing was 38 a few miles back. We were right near a gas station, briefly considered pulling in, but didn’t. Let’s summarize: the low fuel light has been one awhile, the Miles to Empty display is blank and now the last LCD segment of the gas gauge has started blinking. Visions of the car stalling at the very last light before Kroger were taking form in my mind.

Well, we did make it the Kroger, even waited for a pump to free up with the car still running. I filled the tank with 17.5 gallons of gas and it cost $38.38 or $2.19 per. We had traveled 502.5 miles on that 17.5 gallons so since the last fill up the Sonata got 28.7 MPG. While I was outside filling the tank Donna was inside trying to see exactly how much the car’s tank would hold, turns out it is 18.49 gallons. All that worry about running out of gas and I could have traveled over 28 more miles. As long as all 18-1/2 gallons are usable…

101110111000

On the way to Columbia today the Purple Whale passed through the 3,000 mile mark. We were going there to do a little geocaching and we ended up finding 3 caches and not finding three caches. And as expected one of the ones we didn’t find was the reason for the whole trip (this might be a blog post of the future.) This evening I washed the Sonata, so it would stop being jealous of the Miata which got a bath on Friday.