Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Screw the Devil


Sunday afternoon, I took a break from working on my latest project—a script for a new Dark Shadows audio drama—to do a little caching. Headed down to the Devil's Tramping Ground, about 45 minutes south of here, with my neighbors Paul and Jamie, looking to pick up geocache #2,000.

The Devil's Tramping Ground is one of those fabled spots where nothing grows, and reportedly, if anything is left there overnight, it will mysteriously disappear. Well, I don't know about that, but after a solid hour of hunting, we were unable to turn up the cache. I suspect the devil stole it—probably disguised as Boy Scouts cleaning up trash in the area. The site itself is fairly unremarkable; if you didn't know it was the Devil's Tramping Ground, you'd mistake it for just another clearing—albeit in this case, a clearing with "Screw the Devil" etched in the ground.

Anyhoo, the afternoon was far from a waste. I picked up #2,000 at a nearby cemetery, so at least it was suitably grim (though the cache is called Scout's Honor—whoa). Have snagged a few caches since, so I'm on the journey to #3,000, which will no doubt be quite some time coming, since I've pretty much gotten all the local caches that don't require a bunch of traveling to get to.

So now, it's back to the script, which is progressing quite well...at least as far as ye humble author is concerned.

How about a little fire, Devil?

Grabbing cache #2,000

The nearby cemetery at Scout's Honor

2 comments:

Stewart Sternberg (half of L.P. Styles) said...

Hey, I have a question. I just got a new ATT phone which can do GPS...will that GPS be powerful enough to do the geocaching thing? To be honest, you have my curiousity up.

Stephen Mark Rainey said...

Hey Stewart -- I'm really not sure about that, as I'm not familiar with the phone's capabilities. My question would be this -- can you enter GPS coords and have it point you to those coords with reasonable accuracy (within 10 ft. or so). That would be paramount for finding caches. I use a Garmin Etrex H, which is pretty much the economy model for a hand-held GPS, but it does get the job done very nicely. The Garmin 60CSX seems to be the model of choice for many cachers, and there are several others that work very well. Here's a link that might be of use: http://www.geocaching.com/about/buying.aspx