Progress on Greater Memphis Greenline

The Commercial Appeal reported on Sunday that Shelby County reached an agreement with CSX to purchase 7.04 miles of abandoned rail corridor to be used as the first part of the new Greater Memphis Greenline.

In the comments to the article, someone posted an interesting link to the history of this railway line (formerly the NC&STL Railway). The part that was purchased by the County stretches west-to-east from Aulon Station to Mullins Station.

JAG's 2nd Anniversary

On March 17, 2007 a group of misfits and malcontents from GOWT broke off and formed their own group, JAG. I was a little surprised to see their 2nd anniversary pass without an event to recognize it - or at least a loud belch.


JAG's Bluff Boys don't appear to cache much together anymore. At some point within the last year, dalls took down their attempt at a blog. That blog, along with bashful's blog, made me laugh whenever a new post was made.

I did notice that RiverNWick is hosting yogi and dolphin's 5k event: Come On! Let's Celebrate Yogi & Dolphin's 5K! by The Usual Suspects! (GC1NMVN). 5k - that is an awful lot of Nashville light poles.

Update: 3/26/2009: Ah, here it is : JAG Nation Anniversary by Jackson Area Geocachers (GC1P5BM) scheduled for April 25. Only 5 weeks late.

Chicago, IL - March 12, 2008

[ this entry is a work in progress.. ]

I have been thinking about making a daytrip to Chicago for over a year now. On Tuesday, I decided that this week would be a good time to give it a try. The weather was forecast to be a lot colder than I would like, but sunny with no snow. I gathered together the materials I would need and on Wednesday began my trek. After work, I walked downtown to the Amtrak station and picked up a round-trip ticket. I had some time to kill before the train left at 10:40pm, so I walked back to Huey's for a philly cheese steak sandwich and gave the bums a few last chances to hit me up for cash before I left town.

The train trip north wasn't too bad. It would have been better if I had been able to sleep more, though. We arrived at Union Station at 9:20am on Thursday. The short walk to the terminal was bone-chilling, so I went to a gift shop inside the station and bought a sweatshirt.

By 9:30am, I was outdoors and headed south to Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight by Team Purdy (GCHR9P). That was a virtual cache near the Chicago Fire Academy. I avoided a few nearby caches that I had hunted on my last trip, preferring to save them for later. Once I got to Roosevelt Street, I headed east picking up three caches before making my way towards Adler Planetarium.

I stopped at this spot to hunt a cache and failed to find it. One interesting thing about the day is that at each place that I struck out, there was at least an interesting sight to see. This picture was taken near the southwest corner of Grant Park.

The area around the Field Museum of Natural History was under a lot of construction, so I had to detour around fairly large areas. I found Mercury by The League of Extraordinary Geocachers (GC19Y62) near the museum. Ducking more construction, I made my way west towards Adler Planetarium.

Close to the planetarium, I found View on DT. by vbratxv (GC1GWZ3), but by this time my hands were so cold that I couldn't open the container - much less sign the log. I ended up going inside the planetarium to warm up. I used a hot air blower in the men's room to thaw out my hands, then had lunch at Galileo's - a small cafeteria in the planetarium. This was a neat place that I hope to visit again sometime. Back outside, I took a picture of the skyline and headed back to View on DT. You can't see it really well in this picture, but there was a lot of ice along the shoreline.

Going around the construction, I headed north to Grant Park and managed to find two more caches at the north end.

I headed northeast along (and under) Lakeshore Drive and made my way to Navy Pier. I was hit amd miss on caches in this area. Many of their names started with Chicago, and I had trouble differentiating between them. I had the necessary data with me, but a warmer day would have helped me out - I had to keep taking off and putting on my gloves.

I found a cache near this statue - located south of the Chicago Tribune building. This was the day's WTF moment. Note the girl at the bottom right of the stature, I used her as a way to show the scale of the statue.


I found a cache near the beginning of Route 66: One End of Route 66 by Panther in the Den (GCTG87).


I was running out of time, and had a choice to head west or back south into downtown. I chose unwisely. I went after three caches - on the first, my GPSr couldn't get me within 300 feet. The second cache was in the middle of a construction area, and the third was buried in a crowd of muggles. This harshed my mellow a bit.

After failing at my last three caches, I was ready to head back to the train station. I was running out of time to do much more caching and had been walking in the subfreezing cold for around 9 hours. I was a little disoriented as well, by this point and had some trouble figuring out where I was relative to the train station. Fortunately, I stumbled upon the Sears Tower! The station was only a few blocks west of the tower. I wanted to go up to the skydeck, but I was wishy-washy about it. I went to the entrance and walked inside to warm up. Once inside, a greeter talked me into going up. Passing through security was fun with all of my electronic gadgets to put in a basket before I passed through a metal detector. The guard, after finding out I was from Memphis, asked me about Elvis and Graceland.

I had to sit through a short film about the tower before I could go up. The elevator ride took about a minute. I should mention that the Sears Tower has two observation levels. The one on the 103rd floor was closed for maintenance, so I got to look out from the one on the 99th floor.


I spent some time taking pictures, and looking out at some of the places I had been. There was a gift shop on this floor and I bought a small model of the Tower as a souvenir. Much of the other stuff they sold was Obama-related. When I was leaving, I noticed other gift shops as well. They must make a killing on trinkets.

Once outside, I walked the few blocks west to Union Station, had dinner at the food court and waited around for my train home. The ride to Memphis was nice - no seatmate. I didn't sleep any better however.

I arrived in Memphis at 6:30am and wanted to go home and shower before going to work. The Madison trolley was shut down, though, so I ended up going straight to work.

I enjoyed my time in Chicago and hope to revisit this city again. I enjoyed the riverwalks, parks, and museums. I took a lot of pictures even though that meant off with the gloves again!

National's Unknown Soldiers - March 9, 2009

National's Unknown Soldiers by Berlan Eligab (GC1H78D) is a hide that I first went after while on a 20+ mile run last November. I failed to get it then, because of security on the lot watching the building that hides the cache. Sunday is a bad day to go after this cache. I had been since waiting on Daylight Savings time to end so that I could go after this cache on one of my evening runs. Given the area where the cache is, I wanted there to be some daylight when I went after it.

This day was the first weeknight post-DST, so I headed out on a run with no GPSr; only a pen to sign the log. It took me 53 minutes of running to get to Highland and Summer, at which point I decided to walk the remaining 2 blocks. As I was walking, one of the local "friendlies" spit at my feet. Nice. Anyways, I made it to the cache location, and thanks to my previous visit, knew how to avoid the security camera that points near the cache. I got the cache open, pulled out my trusty pen and voila - dry as a bone - my pen, that is. It wouldn't leave a mark. I stepped back and looked around on the ground and found two old pencils laying in the grass. I used one to sign the log. If I had thought about it, I would have broken one in half and left it in the cache container. Having signed the log, I managed to make it out of the area alive and before dark settled in. My trip home took considerably longer than 53 minutes, since I took a longer way home.

La Grande, OR - December 23-26, 2008

I took a train trip home over the Christmas break, and due to the Northwest having an incredible amount of snow, did not get to do much geocaching. This was not entirely a bad thing since it allowed me to focus more on family. I did make it out on a couple of occasions, though.

On December 23, a bunch of my relatives met in town (La Grande) for a family lunch. Afterwards, my Mom, stepfather and I hunted a few caches before driving back to Cove.

There were five caches on the west end of town and we attempted to hit them all.

Our first stop was near City Hall where my stepfather needed to pay a bill. My Mom and I walked roughly 500 feet southeast to a mural where La Grande Dancer by Marty Cache Sniffer & lynndaly (GC1FP7B) was located. The actual hide post was buried in snow so we had to move on. (We came back after the snow had melted and made a quick find of this cache).

Next, we headed south to visit my stepsister and her family for a bit. After leaving there, my Mom reminded us that we had more caches to hunt, so our next stop was Lower Education by Marty Cache Sniffer (GC1GHFE). This was in front of someone's house so fortunately I found it quickly. It was, however, frozen to its hiding spot.

Next, it was a trip to the old town library for Locked Up Library by Marty Cache Sniffer (GC1G9NP). I spent a lot of time at this library while growing up, and hated to see it closed. A new modern library was built downtown. The old library was one of many funded by a grant from Andrew Carnegie. The cache itself was a nano hidden in a spot that at first I overlooked. There was lots of snow here and I didn't want to leave a direct trail to the cache so I stomped around a bit.

The last cache of the day was Cache-n-dash hides a 1/1! by cache-n-dash (GC1G7J1). Cache-n-dash is well-known for high-terrain caches in the hills, so this was an unusual cache for him. There was a guardrail near the coords, so that was the first place I looked. The cache, though, was in a more interesting location. This cache was tough to keep out of sight from neighborhood muggles, so I am surprised to see it still there.

My brother and I made another trip into town on the 26th to hunt River Side Park Cache by Clearwater Explorers and Globaltreckers (GC1FTZZ). This was in one of my favorite parks from childhood and near what will soon by a greenway along the Grande Ronde River. The snow made the hunt difficult, but I ended up approaching from a different direction and found the cache high and dry. After finding this cache, my brother and I went to Bi-Mart to get a few things and I ended up buying a replacement for my old Garmin eTrex Legend that died last year.

Most of the caches I found on this holiday trip were placed by a new cacher, who happens to be a friend of my nephew. The hides were all different, which was neat. Most of them had wet logs, though, and could easily be fixed with some tiny ziplock pill bags. Given the weather extremes, it is important to use containers that hold up under heat and cold.

Triskaidekaphobia

Triskaidekaphobia by itcomagic (GCX12N) is a cache that I've had on my "will hunt soon" list for awhile. It is a three-stage multicache whose stages are in three areas of Memphis. I answered the questions on the cache page to get the first set of coordinates, but since I didn't know where the other stages might be, I have delayed going after it. Reading through the cache logs today, I now know where the other two stages are located. One of the great difficulties of posting an interesting cache logs that adequately details the fun of the hunt is doing so without posting spoiler information. It is the main reason my cache logs are always short.

On a related note:
Spoiler photos in cache logs: U F O by cgeek (GCX8XR) which is rated a 3/5 now has a gallery photo of someone retrieving the cache from its location. One of the cool things about this cache, especially for the inexperienced, is in the discovery of the container. Since the picture was posted more than two months ago, it is obvious that the cache owner doesn't care about the integrity of the cache.