Another Geo-Morning

Werewolf tracks!

Here in Martinsville, getting to geocaches is a bit more difficult and time-consuming than when we lived in Greensboro, but a pretty good crop of new ones have come out both north and south of here. For my birthday, I made an enjoyable jaunt southward; then, yesterday, Ms. B. and I went to Greensboro to run a bunch of errands as well as attend a Cinco de Mayo caching event hosted by friends Skyhawk63 (a.k.a. Tom) & Punkins19 (a.k.a. Linda); and today, I got up early and drove to Rocky Mount, about 30 miles up the road, where I picked up a nice first-to-find on a new trail cache at Waid Park and then a couple of park & grabs.

 

Several hundred caches have come out (and keep coming out) around North Carolina's Piedmont Triad and even beyond, so I've been whittling my way through these, sometimes on my own, sometimes with the No-Dead-Weight Irregulars. These are all exclusively of the park & grab variety, but hey, it's still geocaching. I do need to revisit Greensboro soon to do maintenance on a few of my trail hides that have either gone missing or fallen into disrepair. Most likely next week. I expect I'll be able to fit in a number of park & grabs on that trip as well.

 

Happy hunting, and all that.

Lots of trees fallen over the trail. Duck, you sucker!

Mind  those revenuers!

Social Animals?

Dragon Glass Winery's mascot

Ms. Brugger and I may not be committed homebodies, but socialites we are definitely not. We occasionally go out and about to interact with other members of the human species, but rarely for lengthy periods and almost never without a few days' recovery time. Okay, I exaggerate, but we both lean far closer to the introverted than the extroverted end of the scale. So I dunno what the hell happened this past week. We ventured into the land of the living with frightful enthusiasm, looking damn-near respectable, and behaving like mere minor-league sociopaths. Wot?

There's a new brewery open in town — Renewal Brewing — which Ms. B. and I visited on opening night a couple of weeks ago, and we decided to give it another go this past Thursday with my longest existing childhood friend, Ms. Gretchen. Renewal's brewpub currently occupies the building's basement (known as the "speakeasy"), and the owner soon plans to open a restaurant on the main floor as well as a rooftop bar. It's a great spot, with appealing ambiance, excellent service, and some tasty brews. After sampling a variety of Renewal's offerings, Ms. B., Ms. G., and I headed to dinner at Wild Magnolia restaurant, which has been around for several years, with decent food and atmosphere. And an enjoyable evening this turned out to be.

Old dude, Ms. B., and friend Gretchen at Renewal Brewing in Uptown Martinsville

Saturday, we loaded up with picnic goodies and sallied forth to Gioia dell'Amore Winery (formerly Autumn Creek), where we met friends Joe and Suzy, enjoyed a serious picnic lunch, and drank some decent NC wine (no, "decent NC wine" is not always an oxymoron). Afterward, on a whim, we looked at the map to see if there might be any wineries other than the ones we knew about relatively nearby and discovered one called Dragon Glass Winery, which makes only sweet wines. Ms. B. and I rarely — okay, call it never — go for sweet wine, but since this was a second destination and an attractive location, we figured we could call it dessert. Here, neither of us could finish more than a glass because when I say this wine is "sweet," we're talking "cloying." Still, we enjoyed our experiences at both locations. A damned good day.

Sunday, The No-Dead-Weight Irregulars — this time consisting of friend Scott (a.k.a. Diefenbaker), friend Natalie (a.k.a. Fishdownthestair), and an old dude — gathered again for a Sunday outing and landed ourselves near Chapel Hill, NC, at a place I don't really know what to call. There's Fearrington, Farrington, and Ferrington, all clustered right there, and where one ends and another begins, I've got no fucking idea. Anyway, there are gamelands full of geocaches there, and we hiked after a bunch. The heat was hot, the hiking tough, and the bugs plentiful (including a bunch of ticks, the lousy little bloodfuckers), but we found some mighty cool caches. Sadly, several of the "Halloween" series we sought appeared to be missing, but assuming the cache owners put out replacements, the location will probably be good for another outing.

For lunch, we settled on the nearby Town Hall Burger & Beer, where we've eaten on numerous other caching outings. Damned good dead critter here — lamb for me, and cow for my compadres.

This week is shaping up to be kinda busy as well. Perhaps we'll survive it yet again with flying colors. Woot.

"Hobbit Hole" cache — open wide!

L: big bony spider; R: little bony dude

Bony bat!

Not a geocache, but a very large millicritter

The No-Dead-Weight Irregulars Strike Again

 

While I’m not at all sad about having left Greensboro, I am sad that gatherings with the usual geocaching crew, known as The No-Dead-Weight Irregulars — friends Natalie (a.k.a. Ms. Fishdownthestairs) and Scott (a.k.a. Diefenbaker) — can be problematic. Not to mention we lost our friend and regular caching partner, Rob, some months ago. But yesterday, circumstances came together for a nice, day-long outing in Burlington, which I’ve been itching to do since a bunch of new caches published there over the last couple of months.

There were some fun and challenging hides in this batch. The first one we hunted required a fair change of altitude to reach, as you may see in the photo on the left (and when Natalie took this picture, I still had a little ways higher to go). There was one under a bridge that required some physical dexterity to negotiate, and I’m pleased to say I managed it without any problem. I may be old, but I’m not decrepit! (Not yet, anyway.) And there were several with interesting field puzzles that we managed to conquer, some by not-quite-prescribed means.

For lunch, we found a BBQ joint called Smokehouse at Steve’s, which I’m going to recommend for the fantastic pulled pork. They had a mean-looking brisket, too, which I’ll need to try on a future visit.

It was a fun day indeed, pretty much like old times. May the old times with this crew happen again and again.

Notice a creepy old figure hiding in the shadows up there to Scott’s right...

Attack of the KC88

Old fart in a jon boat. Photo by Linda Enders Roberts

Earlier in the week, the No-Dead-Weight Irregulars had plotted a geocaching outing for today — a challenging tunnel cache in the Raleigh-Durham area. For various reasons, that plan fell through. However, fortuitously, friend NCBiscuit (a.k.a. Linda) gave a shout and asked if any of us would care to go join a little group going kayaking after a bunch of new caches on Lake Holt, over near Butner. Friend Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott) and I, being the only two available from our initial gangsome, decided a day on the water might be just the ticket. So, off we went.

Partway there, I received a message from Linda that kayaks at Lake Holt had gone scarce, and I might better call to see if I could reserve one. As it turned out, all the kayaks were accounted for. My only option was a motorized jon boat, so I decided to go for it.

When we arrived at the lake, both Scott and I were quite surprised by the magnitude of the caching group that had gathered — a total of twenty folks, I believe it was. Mostly, it was friends and familiar faces. I made a handful of new caching acquaintances, which is always fun.

Someone suggested the team name KC88 — for Kayak Crew, August 8 — and it stuck. The jon boat, with its little trawling motor, could barely keep up with the fastest kayakers, but while our numbers spread far and wide over the lake, no one got left behind.

Well, not entirely, anyway.

By the time we had conquered 16 or so of the caches, the jon boat's battery decided it had had quite enough of this functioning business. Little by little, it began to wind down, until...finally...I was moving so slowly that kayakers were circling me at high speed, trying to whip up a current sufficient to keep me going.

Somehow, the boat made it all the way to the end, for a total of 21 caches — ten of which the team claimed first-to-find honors, since the cache listings had been published only yesterday. Fortunately for us, no one had yet gone after those on the west side of the lake.

Anyway, Scott and I finally hit the road for the return trip to the Triad — hot, exhausted, and a little sunburnt. Maybe the No-Dead-Weight Irregulars’ next outing, though, will be that challenging cache in the cool darkness of the underground. That's a whole different kind of cool.

Heading out on Lake Holt

Friend Skyhawk63 (a.k.a. Tom) claims his 17,000th geocache find on the lake.
I wonder whether friend Tom goes geocaching a lot.

Friend Colleen84 (a.k.a. Colleen) whizzes past poor schmucks in jon boats

Friends CJZimmie (a.k.a. Cheryl) and Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott) about to get lost
in the tall grass surrounding one of the lake’s islands

About half of Team KC88

Lake Mike Hike

It has been too long since the No-Dead-Weight Irregulars all got together for a geocaching outing. Today, at last, the usual suspects — Ms. Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Old Rob (a.k.a. Old Rob) and I — headed over Mebane way to Lake Michael, where a couple of relatively new caches awaited our attention. The temperature wasn't as awful as it often is this time of year, though we still had plenty of heat and humidity to go around. We found our two target caches, failed to find a lonely puzzle cache (the last find was in 2014, so it's probably missing), successfully completed a very nice multi-cache at a very old graveyard, happened upon what might have been some kind of Lovecraftian monstrosity lurking along the trail, and knocked out a newish hide in Burlington on the way home. For lunch, we opted for our customary Mexican fare, this time at La Fiesta in Mebane. Pretty danged good, it was.

Seemed like old times, it did. Next week, we're hoping to target a fairly new tunnel cache in Hillsborough. Been a long while for one of those, as well.

A few shots of today's sights follow.

Rusty Wreck & Others

It’s almost a pity the geocache wasn’t way up yonder on that fire tower. Well, emphasis on “almost.” I’m always keen on a good physical challenge, and I’ve been up a rickety-ass fire tower before (see “Beating the Devil and Haw, Haw, Haw,” 12/22/2013), but with four flights of stairs missing and only a bit of rust holding the girders together, this one might have been a little dangerous.

With the weather blessedly again conducive to a geocaching outing (a tad warmer than yesterday, at that), the Socially Distant No-Dead-Weight Irregulars — Diefenbaker (a.k.a. Scott), Fishdownthestair (a.k.a. Natalie), and I — decided to go after three relatively new geocaches at the Cane Creek Mountains Natural Area, not far south of Burlington. We rendezvoused at the parking area at 10:00 this morning, where we discovered friends David & Diana (a.k.a. David & Diana), NCBiscuit (a.k.a. Linda), and Ms. Biscuit’s cache hound Dotty on site. Their caching plans turned out to be identical to ours, so we resolved to combine forces and attack the trail with guns a-blazing. At two of the three caches, all those guns came in handy. Sadly, not at the first of them, which has, by all indications, flown the coop. Happily, we did find the other two, and those, at least, took us to a couple of interesting locations. See the fire tower image above.

The most fun one was “Rusty Wreck” GC95K2D (which wasn’t actually the fire tower). Since I started geocaching in 2008, I have marveled at the sheer number of cars and trucks that appear to have spontaneously grown in the deep woods. The one we found today must have been there a long, long time, as it appeared to be 1950s vintage. The cache itself proved quite a challenge, but find it we did, and we loved the hunt. Nearby, there was a ramshackle shelter, no doubt for the drunken-most set, given the massive number of beer cans congregating around it. It’s literally right next to the trail, so I hope it is not regularly inhabited.

And all that made for another much-needed, very welcome outing in the woods. We put in something between four and five miles in rather rugged terrain (particularly on our way to the fire tower, which required a very long, very steep ascent), so this old not-quite-a-geezer has the sore feets and wee bit of tired.

Laters.

One guess where this guy got his driver’s license....

Somewhat less than five-star accommodations here

A view from high atop the ridge

Back down in the lowlands

Still Life with Old Fart and Fire Tower