At least a couple of times a year, I get with a bunch of geocachers to help clean up an area that needs it — a "cache-in, trash-out" (CITO) event. Today's gathering took place on the Richmond & Danville Rail Trail, in Ringgold, VA, sponsored by Norman & Lynn "Spring1" Dillon. About 15 geocachers from all around Virginia and North Carolina showed up at the trail head at 10:00 AM, and within a few minutes, we had two separate groups attacking two different trail heads and working toward each other. A couple of hours later, there wasn't a speck of trash to be found between the trail heads at Ringgold Depot Rd. and Shawnee Rd. Done, done, and done.
Afterward, the lot of us converged on the Corner Cafe in Ringgold at a meet-and-greet event, sponsored by proprietors Keith and Laura McCoy. On Friday evenings, their dinner special is meatloaf, and they were kind enough to save me some because they know I'm ga-ga for the stuff. Really, it is the most awesomest meatloaf, anywhere, ever. Check it out for yourself, and you see if it's not.
Following that, I headed down through Caswell and Alamance Counties to the Shallow Ford trail system to pick up a relatively new hide and then over to the Haw River to check out an older cache. That one is actually meant to be accessed by boat, but when the water is low enough, you can get to it from the river bank. Today, however, the water was not even a little low, so I did not attempt to make my way out to ground zero, which is a couple of very cool, very old bridge supports. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to go after this one, and its nearby neighbor, the regulation way.
The big mean cache of the weekend was yesterday's... a new hide, called "Fox Den," in Greensboro that entailed crawling into a huge, hollow, fallen tree and snagging an ammo can placed some ten feet deep inside. There was a lot more to it than that, but I won't go into detail and give too much away. Mr. Rob "Robgso" Isenhour and I managed a nice first-to-find, occasionally in the pouring rain, late yesterday afternoon. Suffice it to say I came home wetter and filthier than I probably ever have from a caching trip.
Jumpin' Jehosaphat, the things some of us will do to get a smiley.
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| The CITO group after working over the Richmond & Danville Rail Trail in Ringgold, VA |
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| Yep, there's a cache there, but without waders, I wasn't keen on attempting to ford the river. |