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The Vaccinated But Still Socially Distant No-Dead-Weight Irregulars
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No fire-breathing Tyrannosauruses on today’s geocaching adventure, but we did
encounter a fire. The
Vaccinated But Still Socially Distant No-Dead-Weight Irregulars —
Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a.
Natalie), Old Rob (a.k.a. Old Rob), and ye olde fart
(moi) — met up at Falls Lake in Durham County to hike
one of the area’s rail trails. This one is the long-abandoned
Durham & Northern rail line, which dates back to 1887. There are
ten caches along this particular stretch, and we set out to find them.
The hike took us about a mile and a half out to a point in the lake
accessed by the narrowest of land bridges. The cache out there — “Guardian of the Point” (GC1DN30) — was an easy favorite for us, as the scenery out on that long, narrow
strip of land turned out to be pretty spectacular. And we found fish. Dead
fish. Many dead fish. They had clearly been swimming around there during a
period of high water, and when it receded, they were trapped. Well, that
really wasn’t what I would consider a favorite moment, but it was different.
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Smoke pouring from hollow tree
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One of the caches along our trek — “Loco Fuel” (GC5K7D4) — may have been the victim of the fire-breathing tyrannosaurus I sought
yesterday (“
The Lair of a Fire-Breathing T-Rex”), for at ground zero, we found not a cache but a sizable area of scorched
earth. It was recent enough that we found smoke belching from the trunk of a
hollow tree right at ground zero. Much to our chagrin, we couldn’t come up
with even a melted lump of plastic here, though since we do know the cache owner, we took it upon ourselves to replace the container to (hopefully) keep it in
play.
Once finished with the rail trail, our crew sallied forth to
Hillsborough where we took a tour of several of the town’s myriad
historical buildings by way of a recently published
Adventure Lab
cache. This one proved fun and edumacational. Then we made our way to
Hillsborough BBQ Company for the first group lunch we have had in quite some time. Happily, we
were able to sit outdoors, which we all still prefer.
And after all that, exhaustion set in. My birthday is coming up, so I may be
even more exhausted at this time next week.
That is all.
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All that remains of an old trestle
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| Something fishy |
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Heading out to the distant point
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| The view from GZ back the way we had come |
