Beyond the Gate

Today was the day to attempt a new geocaching milestone: geocache find #12,000. For this outing, the Socially Distanced No Dead Weight Irregulars — Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), and the old radioactively mutated flying rubber prehistoric reptile — welcomed friend NCBiscuit (a.k.a. Linda) to our ranks as we went after a nice tunnel hide in Durham, NC, called “Beyond the Gate” (GC5C0C4), placed several years ago by friend Vortexecho (a.k.a. Christian). Ground Zero is a lovely location, which you see in the photo above, and it’s right behind the apartment complex where my daughter lived after she graduated college, back in... well... a handful of years ago. The pipe is big, so once inside it, we could easily walk upright. We found the biggest challenge to be wriggling through that broken gate. The pipe isn’t very long — maybe a hundred feet — but it sure is wet in there. You end up in a drain out in the middle of a pond.

Inside that pipe, I encountered the biggest crawdude I’ve seen since I was a kid, when I loved playing in the creek across from our house in Martinsville. He measures almost six inches long there. He proved friendly enough, though he was not at all an enthusiastic conversationalist. So as not to upset him needlessly, I avoided mentioning that crawdad is one of my favorite delicacies.

After completing the deed at “Beyond the Gate,” we shrugged off the increasingly oppressive heat and moved on to a nearby cache that has been in the wild for several days but has yet to be found. It isn’t meant to be especially difficult, but a number of geocachers have been unable to locate it. Count us among them. After a diligent, fairly lengthy search, we were forced to give up in frustration.

Some old fellow hanging around in the dark

From there, Ms. NCBiscuit departed, leaving the regular Irregulars to strike out after a number of caches along the American Tobacco Trail. Hoo, doggies, was it ever hot and ugly out there! We decided to end our day at another of Vortexecho’s tunnel caches, but unfortunately, claiming a find on this one was not to be. LV-426 (GC4YJFD) lurks deep inside a series of very tight culverts, requiring either crawling or very constricted duck-walking. I opted for the latter. Once way down deep inside, though, we encountered some smoky fumes oozing from a couple of pipes — one of the inevitable hazards of such locations — and decided to abandon our search. Never let it be said we are irredeemably foolhardy. Merely foolish.

That ended our adventure for the day, although before coming back home, I had to get even hotter and filthier helping Brugger put up a new mailbox in front of her house, since the old one was by all rights condemned. That done, I finally made it home and fell into the shower, for which every organism within a hundred feet of the property thanked me profusely.

It was a day.

Beyond the gate at “Beyond the Gate”

Old Rodan and VERY Old Diefenbaker

Heat be hot!

Spooky and the Train

What a happy bunch! Old Rodan, Fishdownthestair, Diefenbaker, Old Rob

Today's geocaching venture took Team No Dead Weight to the American Tobacco Trail in Wake County to finish up the Train geoart we had started a couple of weeks ago (see "Fun in All Directions," February 02/02/2020). Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), Robgso (a.k.a. Old Rob a.k.a. Bloody Rob a.k.a. Old Bloody Rob), and I headed out fairly early this a.m., hit the trail, and, after about a six-mile round trip, completed the geoart. The image is the shape of an oncoming train engine, although this one is surrounded by so many other caches, it's kind of difficult to discern its shape amid the jumble of cache icons on the Google maps overlay.

After that, we decided we needed some bison. Lots of it, with fries and Bloody Marys and nachos and hot jalapenos. We found all this and more at Ted's Montana Grill, a few miles north in Durham. It's been a favorite dining destination over the years, particularly when it's a group of us out geocaching. On our drive, though, we noticed a nearby cache called "SPOOKY 3" (GC194GB) placed by Vortexecho (a.k.a. Christian), who is one of our favorite cache hiders because of the extreme nature of many of his hides. In this case, getting to the cache didn't require anything too extreme, although the host was a big, huge, Ent-like beast that stood out above all other trees in the forest. It's no great spoiler to reveal that the cache was hidden deep inside a cavernous opening in the tree's base. I made the venture into that dark chamber, which required some serious wriggling and stretching. Later, as we left the restaurant, dear friend Scott spoke up and said, "Hey, Mark, do you realize you look as though you might have been crawling around inside a big old tree?"

Well, the thought had occurred to me, though a little forewarning before heading into a nice restaurant might have been preferable. At least it was almost as dark in the restaurant as it was in the tree.

A fine day on the trail. Cache count after this trip stands at 11,736. That is all.

Fun in All Directions

02022020: a palindrome, a sequence that reads the same backward and forward — today's date, for example. So, the brain trust at geocaching.com, as it is inclined on certain, usually random occasions, offered a virtual "souvenir" to geocachers who log a geocache find or attend a geocaching event on February 2, 2020. I believe there were a handful of events in the area, but to earn the day's souvenir, I joined the Usual Suspects — Cupdaisy (a.k.a. Shoffner), Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), and Old Robgso (a.k.a. Rob) — for one of our regular Sunday geocaching outings. This time, we hauled ourselves out to the American Tobacco Trail in Wake County to see how much of a new train-themed geoart series, placed by friend NCBiscuit (a.k.a. Linda) we could claim. Geoart simply means that the geocache icons form a specific pattern on the geocaching overlay on Google maps. This particular example resembles the front of a steam engine barreling right at you. There are forty caches in the series (plus a bonus), which occupy about a nine-mile stretch of the American Tobacco Trail. Mind you, that's one-way, start-to-finish, so since we were hoofing it, we were pretty sure we would not be completing the entire geoart. (Some of us are old. Some of us are really old.) And we didn't. But we did put in a good eight-mile round trip, and we did make a fair dent in the numbers (we claimed 28 out of 40). By the time we arrived back at Ms. Fishdownthestair's cache mobile, we were traveling on some reasonably sore dogs.

Somewhere along the line, someone decided that, rather than go by our usual team monkers, such as Team No Dead Weight or The Usual Suspects, we should call ourselves Groundhogs. So we did.

Much to my surprise, at the end of the day's geocaching, my total cache count turned out to be a palindrome as well: 11711. Figure that!

Jackelope!

After our big old trail hike, we stopped at a nearby cache called "The Jackelope" (GC8GH1V), which provided us with a nice chuckle. Then we procured a very late lunch at The Carolina Brewery in Pittsboro, which has become our regular stop for vittles when we're caching in that area. Decent stuff, to be sure.

Now, lord knows this old fellow needs the hoofing-it mileage more than the brewery fare, but I can testify that by this time we were sure enough suffering from The Great Starvation. (Just ask my cats how awful this condition is.) When I first started geocaching, in early 2008, I was still smoking and carrying around something in the neighborhood of 210 pounds — which, I can tell you, is about 30 pounds too much for this weenie frame. As I dove whole-heartedly into geocaching, with the associated hiking and various physical challenges, I stopped smoking and lost over 20 pounds. For a good five years, I kept the weight off, maintained a reasonably healthy diet (wine doesn't have any calories, does it?), and exercised constantly (even above and beyond the geocaching, at least on occasion). However, in more recent days, since I have to travel farther and farther afield to claim caches, the exercise is a bit less frequent, although — most often — just as intense as ever. Still, I fear I have not correspondingly reduced my calorie intake or maintained a regular non-geocaching exercise regimen. Thus, some of that old weight has found its way back onto these old bones. As much for vanity's sake as for my health, I figure I really should shed some of this re-accumulated bulk. At least I'm still hovering  just under 200 pounds; still a a good bit less than my maximum, least-healthy weight.

Okay, so I had a beer at the brewery. OKAY, SO I HAD TWO BEERS AT THE BREWERY. I promise won't do it again.

Well, at least until I'm back in Pittsboro.

The Groundhogz! Left to Right: Old Man, Old Rob, Old Scott, Ever-So-Slightly-Less-Old Natalie,
Older'n-Fookin'-Methuselah Shoffner

11K Milestone

Just over eleven years after I started geocaching, I found my 11,000th geocache — yesterday, on the American Tobacco Trail, south of Durham, NC. I didn't make any special plans for this particular milestone, as I have for others. Last year, for my 10,000th, Ms. B. and I made a ten-mile round-trip hike to McAfee Knob near Roanoke, VA (see "Ten Years, Ten-Thousand Geocaches"). In past years, for various milestone caches, I've gone deep underground, paddled many miles in a kayak, and gone up great big trees. Really, it is kind of a pain in the tail to try to plan for a specific milestone on a specific date. Eleven thousand is a nice number, but this didn't seem worth the hassle of all that planning. So, since a bunch of us had previously decided to hit the ATT on Sunday, I figured that whichever cache I found for 11K was all fine with me.

It was a crowd of the usual suspects that headed to Durham on Easter Sunday morning. Cupdaisy (a.k.a. Shoffner), Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), Robgso (a.k.a. Old Rob) set out bright and early for the trail. Our group, whoever among us it happens to be, usually adopts a team name, and for this one, in honor of Easter, I suggested Team Walking Dead. Alas, I was outvoted in favor of Team Easter Bunny. It wasn't until we'd hopped a fair distance and grabbed several caches that I even figured out which one was actually 11K. Turns out it was a nice little hide called "Biscuit Got a Rock" (GCXK5W), hidden by friend NCBiscuit (a.k.a. Linda). We ended up snagging 14 caches on a 7-mile hike, and we had designs for a few more, until....

A friend of my mom's called to tell me he and his family had taken her to church and lunch, but she had locked herself out of her house. She had keys, but they didn't seem to work. So, being the caregiver of note, I ended up having to head up to Martinsville, pick up Mum from her friends', and get her back into her house. The kicker was that her key actually worked — the door, being swollen from humidity, appears to have been a sticky bastard, giving the impression that it wouldn't unlock. It just took a little extra futzing. So, it was a long trip up and back that wasn't really necessary, all the more frustrating since I had just been there on Friday and Saturday. Sigh. But in any event, all is well that ends well, Mum is happily ensconced in her house, and I have 11,000 caches under my belt.

I hereby hope for a calamity-free week, as there have been more than the customary share of calamities in recent days. So calm it the fuck down, all right? Would ya? Thx.