The Original Buster Brown - 3/7/2010

[ This is from part of a trip to Jonesboro-Paragould, AR ]

As I was leaving Paragould, AR and heading east on Hwy 412, I started looking for a gas station. My GPSr helpfully told me that all of the nearest gas stations were behind me. I had planned on heading south towards Monette, AR to hunt a few more caches, but the next nearest gas station was just past the exit. After getting gas at the world's lamest BP, I noticed that I was within striking distance of The Original Buster Brown by Bulldog Duo (GC1P047) near Hornersville, MO (pop 629). It was a beautiful day to be hunting caches and I still had plenty of daylight left, so I decided to make the detour.

The cemetery where Major Ray AKA "Buster Brown" and his wife Jennie are buried seems out in the middle of nowhere. The road leading to the cemetery transformed from nice pavement, to pothole-scarred road to gravel road.

Upon pulling up to the entrance and getting out, I spotted a golf cart near the rear of the cemetery. The coordinates told me that I would be heading towards them.

This was a simple puzzle cache - the start coordinates lead you to the grave markers of Buster Brown and his wife. As I was writing down the information needed to compute the second stage, a boy walked up to me and asked what I was doing. Ever the ambassador, I simply responded "treasure hunting". He yelled back at his dad to tell him what I said I was doing. He told he that he and his dad were just looking at graves. I thought he would hang around to see if I found what I was looking for, but I guess he got bored watching me write stuff down.

The GPSr and the coordinates took me on a roundabout way through some rough thorns to finally get to the container. I was fortunate to be just out of sight of the kid and his dad. I opened the container to sign the logbook and found an Original Stash geocoin, which I took to move on.

I hiked back to my car and took a last look out at the cemetery before leaving. This was probably my favorite hide of the day (and why I chose to write a separate blog entry).

After leaving the cache area and making my way back to the highway, I decided to head east to I-55 and head south to Memphis.

[ Note: I was going to avoid posting spoilers to the cache hunt, but the cache log pictures and other information on-line pretty much allow you to plot the second stage from your computer. ]