High in Alamance County

It's one of those days that's too nice not to go geocaching, so I went geocaching — all around Alamance County, next door, in the company of my good friend Bridget "Suntigres" Langley. There's a relatively recent set of six caches over that way, each at one of the various branches of the Alamance County Public Library. It turned out to be an excellent little series, with several clever hides, none very difficult but all far more enjoyable than your garden variety park-and-grab cache. A few other new, well-placed caches made it a fruitful and highly enjoyable day. Tree-climbing has always among the old dude's favorite activities, and as you might deduce from the photos above, one of the caches along the Haw River Trail (GC5704W) provided the perfect outlet for that particular urge.

A good 1.5 inches long, this
rotten-ass fly-beast.

Another favorite was a new multi called "The Code" (GC57YFF) placed by frequent caching companion Robbin "Rtmlee" Lee at his own place of business. To even get past the first stage, one needs to utilize an app on a smart phone, and once you do, you're in for a big treat — providing you can figure out the "code" the app reveals to you. At another cache, we encountered the landowner, who had no idea there was a cache hidden at his place (generally a big no-no) but who, it turns out, was a good friend of one of our local diehard geocachers and quite familiar with our peculiar little hobby. He was fine with the container being hidden where it is and called his friend to let him know there was caching to be done — which is, to my mind, far more sporting than threatening to whack geocachers with a lawnmower blade.

No summer day in the south is complete without all kinds of critters in evidence. At the aforementioned cache, not only the landowner, but a very friendly snake came along to watch what we were doing. At another, a horsefly approximately the size of Rodan the Flying Monster gave us the compound eye but — fortunately — otherwise let us be. I say fortunately because he was so big and ferocious-looking that a close encounter with him would have amounted to a bad end for one of us.

Indeed, a highly satisfying day on the caching trail. Some of those Alamance County folks have their creative brains engaged. Always welcome.

Click images to enlarge.