Geocaching

Sand in My Shoes

Day 6 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Monahans, TX. to Monahans, TX. A rest day and visit with Donna’s brother day. But first, we got up early and headed just a few miles east of Monahans to do a little geocaching in the Sandhills State Park. We parked in one spot and followed the road for a little under a half mile through the campground to the first cache.

After signing the log we thought it would be cool to walk directly across the dunes to the other cache about a mile away. We made it to about halfway before giving up and getting in the car to drive over to the next one. Turns out it was fun to walk on the dunes, but not that fun.

Much to our chagrin, the second cache was hidden in the middle of the dunes, so we ended up having to “bushwack” our way across the sand about an 1/4 of a mile one way. On this section though there was a lot more desert vegetation making the sand firmer and easier to walk on than the nothing-but-sand sand first trek.

The third and last cache was an Earth Cache where there is no actual container, but questions to answer. There were three questions that needed answering here and we couldn’t find the answers in the usual places, ie. the informational kiosks or signs on the trails. So we went inside the visitor’s center and asked the ranger, she must get that a lot as she had them written down right at the front desk.

We were four for four today as we had picked up one in the town of Monahans itself before making it out to the stat park.

The Windmills of Your Mind

Day 5 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Abilene, TX. to Monahans, TX. At a scheduled 205 miles, today’s drive is the second shortest of the trip, so we “killed” some time by first driving into downtown Abilene and walking around looking at the 17 storybook statues that are located near the Visitors Bureau.

We also did a bit of geocaching on our short backroad trip west, again finding 4 of the 5 we looked for.

We drove by two separate wind farm installations on the route, one near the town of Merkel, which has the audacity to call itself the Windmill City and one outside Lemesa where this photo was taken, while we hunted for a geocache along US180. Whenever we encounter a wind farm like this I start to hear in my mind the song The Windmills of Your Mind from the original The Thomas Crowne Affair movie.

Tonight’s meal was Mexican. We have been avoiding it as a cuisine on the trip so far, so that we could reserve our taste buds until we got closer to the real deal. We might have waited another day or so until we got into New Mexico, but Donna’s brother Steve, the reason for the stop in this west Texas town, suggested it for dinner.

21,000 Indian Blankets


Day 4 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Tyler, TX. to Abilene, TX. Like avoiding big cities, another hallmark of a Bogardus road trip is at least one meal a day at a local spot and today because we were at a regular Holiday Inn instead of an Express1, we drove a couple miles down the road to a place called The Diner. We highly recommend eating here if you ever find yourself in Tyler and if you go for breakfast, you absolutely need to try the Banana French Toast2.

Instead of geocaching along the route today, after breakfast we headed over to a local park in Tyler that had a walking trail with a bunch of caches. On our mile and a half walk we found 4 of the 5 we looked for.

On FM2114 between Laguna Park and the town of West the road was lined along both sides wild flowers. Finally I could stand it no longer, so I found a spot that led to a ranch entrance and pulled off to take a picture. While I was circling the car looking in a field of Indian Blanket flowers for the image I wanted, Donna was inside the car taking pictures of me. Not too far west of West, Texas, which is now my second favorite town name, right after North, South Carolina, the Ladybug rode past its twenty first thousandth mile.

I would like to tell you we gave the car a bath when we stopped for the night in celebration of this milestone, but it was really for washing off the bird blood off the hood and windshield. About 15 miles outside of Abilene on I-20, with Donna at the wheel, a bird decided to fly right into the front of the Mini. For the record I still lead in bird kills 2 to 1 having scooped one of them up in the mouth of the Miata back in 2008 and 2015.

We’re the Hekawi


Day 2 of our 2018 Jumbo Road Trip.

Birmingham, AL to Vicksburg, MS. Seeing as we are in the Mini and not the Miata, there are no Moss Motoring Challenge photos to take, so to occupy our time while travelling just 200-300 miles a day we are falling back on an old sideline – Geocaching.

For the first 5 days, until we get to Donna’s brother Steve’s house in Monahans, TX, I have mapped out our routes on the geocaching website and downloaded the 40 or 50 caches that we could look for along the way. We will definitely be cherry-picking a whole lot less than that each day, but you never really ever know what or where you might feel like a break from driving.

If you make a custom route on Google Maps, you can save it, but if you call it back up using the app on your phone it loses all the changes and presents you with typical Interstate, fastest time, route to just the destination. If you create the custom route in Google’s My Maps app online and then call it up on your phone the map is there, but you cannot get turn by turn directions from it, nor will it follow the phones GPS, so it is worthless.

Once you have saved a map on the geocaching website it turns it into a GPX file that you can download that is of a rough approximation (ie. doesn’t smoothly follow the actual roads) of the route. This cannot be imported into a Garmin car GPS to use, as in motion routing so that is no help. But I did find an app online, GPX Viewer Pro, that does work for this on my phone. It is not perfect, but it is fine.

Somewhere in the middle of nowhere Alabama we were following along the GPX track fine until we came to a spot where we needed to take a left turn, but there were two of them just 20 feet apart. The GPX resolution was not accurate enough to single out which one to take, so I took the first one. This was a Grade ‘D’ road, it was narrow, really rough surfaced and bumpy as all get out. I asked my navigator to look at the map and let me know how long I was going to be heading in this direction until the next new road. “Eight or nine miles,” came the reply. I said, “Maybe it was the other left. Let’s go back and try that road.” She said, “Let’s.”

I turned around, found the second left and headed southeast again. This road was no better. And it got worse in a hurry, less than a mile in, it turned to gravel. another u-turn and when we got back to the spot between the two turns I pulled off and parked so we could figure out a plan (the above photo is what we saw when we stopped.) We ended up backtracking about 10 miles to get on an actual numbered state highway and gave up on the geocaching for the day.

Our Lucky Day

We’ve had a couple of DNFs on two of our caches down on the old US301 trail recently, so on Sunday we decided to make the drive down and see what is going on with them.

One of the caches, “Kiosk #1”, was right there at the spot where you park, but we decided to walk the 3/4 mile down the trail to the one called “Used to be Twin Stumps.” It is called “Used To Be” because at one time we had a cache there called just “Twin Stumps” for the two side-by-side tree stumps that were there. But one stump turned to sawdust and we lost the spot where the container was hidden.

I was holding the GPSr and I stopped when it read 4′ from destination. I was nowhere near a stump and and a hump of sawdust. We both looked around for where we might have hidden a cammoed waterproof matchstick holder, nothing stood out. We both mentally scratched around in our heads for a recollection of where we might have put it, nothing stood out. So walked back a ways until we found the used to be twin stumps. Still couldn’t remember where we put it, but I said, “If I was hiding something like that today, I’d put it right there.” I went over and lifted the end of a 2 foot by 4 inch diameter log and right there was the container. Donna opened it up and the log was dry, so we put it back under the log.

That log was almost 40 feet from where the GPSr said the cache should be, so I laid the unit on the log, created a new waypoint and let it sit there for a bit all the while averaging its location. While we waited I re-read over the description of the log and I had mistakenly mention that you had to climb down the embankment and to be careful. While that note is needed for one of the caches we placed on the trail, it did not apply to this one. These two things were more than enough to make someone DNF this cache, so when we got home I edited the description to say the cache was at trail level and corrected the coordinates.

When we got got to the end of the trail to check on “Kiosk #1” it was not inside the crook of the three small trees we had placed it in. It was laying on the ground right next to them. This is a 2-stage cache, the coordinates lead you to the kiosk and then to find the container you have to walk 150′ at a course of 270°. The distance is right, but maybe I don’t have the course right? We found it using that parameter, so who knows.

We were lucky in that we didn’t need to replace either container, but that is not the real lucky part. On the way to look for “Kiosk #1”, we knew that it was off in the woods to the right of the old paved road, so we took the first opportunity to get off the pavement along a little path in the weeds. I went first and Donna was a couple steps behind me. About 20 feet in I heard her behind me say, “Hey! That’s a snake! And it rattled!” I turned around and we both walked back a couple steps. Sure enough, there was a very viper-ish looking snake all curled up and the thickest part I could see looked about wrist sized. I’m not real schooled on just what kind of snake it was and I didn’t want to get close enough to take a good picture. But if in fact it was a rattlesnake we were both very lucky because we walked less that two feet from the reptile.

Post-apocalyptic Walk

Old US301

The past week or so we’ve had a few people take a walk on the the Old US301 Nature Trail and look for our geocaches there. Of the eight caches we have hidden out there, we had 1 DNF, 1 wet log and 1 note telling us 1 doesn’t seem to have been found since last August. So today we took a drive down there to do some checking.

The DNF was right where it was supposed to be and the wet log was as dry as a bone. The one that hasn’t been found since August may very well have disappeared the day after it was last found because it was not there at all. It was called Twin Stumps because it was hidden behind a couple of sawed off close to the ground trees. Both of them were turning to sawdust and especially the one the cache was supposed to be behind, so instead of trying to hide something again right in that spot, we looked a foot or so away and there was an inviting log to hide a replacement under.

Every time we come here and take a walk I marvel at how nature is reclaiming this narrow roadway since they stopped using it in 1965 and sometimes when there is no traffic on the replacement road 50 yards parallel to the north it so quiet I almost expect to stumble on a couple of shuffling zombies.

Lost Without GPS

Lake Bosworth

This is the view off the back deck of our home for the next week, Lake Bosworth with Mt. Pilachuck in the background.

Well, it wouldn’t be a complete trip for us unless we left something behind. Something somewhat essential, but realizing its absence at a point to far away from home to warrant turning around for. Partway to Atlanta we realized that the car GPS was not in the car we were in. It was home in the trunk of the Miata.

This way wasn’t too a big problem, we had a paper map of the state, plus the DeLorme map book and we could find our way to Scott’s in Granite Falls, but finding our cabin on the lake might be an issue. We did have the hand held GPS which we brought along in case we go hiking where there might be geocaches. I could plug the coords into that and use its turn by turn feature, but the screen is postage stamp sized compared to the car GPS.

We decided that if we could get an add-on GPS for the rental car for about $5 a day we would do it. We are members of the Emerald Club at National, so normally we just grab a car and go, but this time we stopped at the counter. I asked the lady how much and her answer was $16.95 a day! Yikes, you could buy a new one for that after 6 days. Donna asked if there was a weekly rate. That was sixty bucks, which was almost tempting. Then the counter agent remembered our Emerald Club membership and commenced to clicking to see what the Emerson discount might be. For us it would be $50 or a bit over seven dollars a day for rental period, so we took it.

Good thing too, because the hand held GPS wouldn’t have been any help, turns out all I loaded was the southeast US topo maps not the whole USA like I thought. Which is sort of almost like what I did our last trip out here.