Arlington, TN Redux - 4/30/2011

I had big plans for this weekend. I had planned to drive to Oxford, MS and participate in Thacker Mountain Trails CITO Event by SniperChicken (GC2N387). I signed up for this event on April 6 and was thinking I'd CITO and cache on Saturday and stick around Sunday and cache some more. As the days passed, I kept watching to see if anyone else would be attending the CITO. I watched the Mississippi forums for talk and saw little. The week of the event, we had terrible storms with tornadoes and flooding. Oxford appeared to get worse weather than we had in Memphis, but as far as I knew, the event was still on. The night before the event (Friday), I checked the logs and saw that I was still the only one who had signed up. I decided at that point to cancel my plans and go some other time. The event went on as scheduled with only a few people showing up.

[ calm after the storm ]

In the meantime, my buddy jbgreer called me up Friday night and asked if I wanted to get together for breakfast and some caching. This worked for me, but I had to scramble to get together a list of caches to hunt. It didn't help that a lot of the good caches were underwater due to flooding.

Saturday, we got together for breakfast and I pulled out my map of caches. We decided to hunt a few on a line between Bartlett, TN and Arlington, TN. Most of these caches were simple park and grabs, but sometimes you just have to get out of the house and do something.

The first find of the morning was MMEW #7 Deathly Hollows Part 1 by sskaysee (GC2KGJB). It was part of a series based on the Harry Potter books and placed at theaters where the HP movies were shown.

We had a lot of DNFs. Some were due to the presence of muggles, others because... well you know. One of our DNFs was at The Hidden Park Treasure by SniperGuy (GC1C42X). This was a cache that I hadn't gone after before because, I suspected I'd have trouble finding the park. On this day, we found the park, but not the cache.


A lot of the caches we found on this day were placed by new cachers. Some were really nicely done, like most of the caches put out by kasitay. Others were not so well done. Altoids tins do NOT make good outdoor cache containers.

[ the coordinates were also waaaay off ]

We had to replace two logs with new paper and ziplock bags. I had the bags, but I had to resort to tearing up some pages that I had printed out puzzle solutions on. Fortunately, I was able to make logs without the parts that had coordinates on them.

Since jbgreer had in his possession a TB that needed to be put out, and we were hunting park and grabs, we made a quick stop at I.H. Managerial Park in Lakeland, TN and placed it in an ammo can cache that I had logged last weekend.

We went back to the Arlington Sportsplex and picked up The Heart of the South Loves Juliette Low by kasitay (GC2TQYY) . I was at this park last week, just before this cache was published. It was a tribute to Juliette Low, who was the founder of the Girl Scouts. Our last cache of the day was a few miles away - still in Arlington - called Honoring Arlington by dneedham (GC2KPXT). This park looked kind of creepy in the aftermath of the storm, but the cache was nice and in great shape. The next tree over, however, was not in great shape.

This was enough caching for us on this day. It was starting to get a little cloudy, in preparation for the next round of storms. We saved plenty of park and grabs for another day.

Lakeland-Arlington, TN - 4/24/2011

Easter weekend looked good weather-wise for geocaching, but I hadn't gotten around to taking my car to the mechanic and didn't really want to do much driving until I did. Saturday, I got an invitation to have Easter dinner with my family in Rosemark, so I picked two nice parks along the route (roughly) to hunt a few caches before dinner.

On Sunday, I ended up leaving home later than I had planned. To complicate matters, I didn't have an up-to-date pocket query loaded on my GPS, so I had to print a couple of the cache pages to take with me. At least the weather was nice - and my car started.

My first stop was I. H. Managerial Park in Lakeland, TN. There were three recently placed caches in this park. My first find was fairly close to where I entered the trail system - CWL012.2 Lakeland Stash by CWL (GC2RF3R). I had found a number of CWL caches back when I first started geocaching (late 2004). He hadn't been out caching much in recent years, so I was surprised to see this cache come out. Nice first find of the day, though.

[ The entry to the trail system - at least it was one entry...]

The second cache I went after was She hates nature by kasitay (GC2TB9M). Getting to the area was a little tricky. My GPS needed recalibrating and it took a while to find an open spot in the woods. The trail system is also very strange. I crossed a number of trails, looking for the right one. When I got to the right area, I struck out. Lots of poison ivy kept me from getting too close to some of the possible hiding spots. I decided to catch a breather at the nearby lake before moving on to the next cache.

[ The lake was a pretty shade of blue. ]

[ One of many trails... ]

The last cache I went after here was Fairies Treehouse by GoreJess (GC2EN1J). It was designed to be easily spotted, but getting to the area was tough. I was tempted to cross a big ravine using a convenient fallen tree, but my experience told me to keep looking for a better way. I found the better way and the cache.

Afterwards, I wanted to avenge my one DNF, but I was running out of time. Fortunately, I did not get lost (unlike my previous visit) and managed to find the quick way back to my car.

After leaving the park, I headed east to Arlington to pick up two caches at the Arlington Sports Complex. It was quiet here as well. I was running behind on time, but managed to find both No squirrel's home. . . by 5sunds (GC2R9PR) and Girl Scouts Forever by 5sunds (GC2RPJK). The latter cache was a nice lock-n-lock with plenty of goodies to trade.

[ I only got to explore the southeast part of the trail. ]

Whew! Now it was onward to Rosemark, TN where I was supposed to be at 4pm for Easter dinner. I was only 5 minutes late!

Howard McVay Park - 4/10/2011

I was in the middle of making plans to hunt some caches on the Ole Miss campus in Oxford, MS when I received a note that Howard-McVay Park by Canadian Bear (GCM4TG) had been found and that it had no logbook. I adopted this cache from Canadian Bear in 2005 and aside from replacing the container and changing the hide slightly, have had no maintenance issues since March of 2006. Recently the logbook had been reported as wet and finally missing, so it was definitely time to revisit this cache.

[ previous hide spot ]

I had considered archiving it. 6+ years is a pretty good run for a cache. Before making any decisions, though, I wanted to see what kind of shape the container was in and how much the landscape had changed since my last visit - 5 years ago. I made plans to hunt a few caches in the Cordova/Germantown, TN area and then fix up my cache in Howard McVay Park (in Germantown).

---

I woke up early on Sunday, but it was tough getting out of bed. None of the caches on my list for this day seemed particularly interesting on paper, and I knew that half of them would be simple lightpole caches. Still, one was at a Wal-Mart and since I needed a few things from there, I managed to hit the road by 9am.

My first group of caches were clustered by the Wal-Mart. I started off with Tracks by aschrack & cwiggs (GC26PXH). This was along a grassy area that will eventually become part of the eastern end of the Memphis Greenline. It was nice to get to see the area before it gets paved.

[ The east end of the Memphis Greenline is about a mile away. ]

I followed this up by T.D.D. #8 by dragon9981 (GC2QF6H) at a nearby CVS pharmacy. The T.D.D series are lightpole caches in the parking lots of CVS/Walgreens/Rite Aid stores. No problem, except most of these are within eyesight of each store's drive-thru pharmacy.

Wall-E # 2322 by dragon9981 (GC2QF6V) was at the Wal-Mart in the area. After signing the cache log, I went in to buy two pairs of blue jeans. I entered the store at 10am and didn't get out until 10:30am. My holdup was the check-out line. I got in the "20 items or less express line" with my two items. There were two women in front of me. The first one had all of her items rung up and then realized she couldn't pay for all of that stuff. It had to be unrung up one item at a time until the lady could pay her bill. For some reason the cashier had to shut down the register and look for a manager in order to do this. Meanwhile, I noticed the the other woman in line in front of me had at least 40 items in her cart. I ended up having to change lines - not an easy task. Why am I telling you all of this? Because it took more time standing in line then it did to hunt all of the lightpole caches I did on this day (four). Plus, it was more interesting.

Anyways, my next two cache hunts were at the eastern corner of Shelby Farms. Ahhh, the woods! I found NIPPON POKEMON by NavyBryants (GC2QF3K) easily after a short hike. The other cache Kidz Kache by polikkronos (GC2MENF) was a no find, in part because the hint told me an obvious spot to search, but the cache description (that I failed to read) said that they had changed the location of the cache. I had looked at the spot where the cache was actually hidden and said "Naaah, it couldn't be under that big trash bag."

[ Ahhhh.... the woods. ]

[ No bikers today. ]

[ Not far from the "dog park" section of Shelby Farms. ]

After two more T.D.D. caches, I made my way to Howard McVay Park and parked in the lot near a kids playground. Surprisingly there were no muggles as I made my way to the cache in a wooded area 300 feet away from the playground.

The cache was clearly visible, with little available greenery to hide it. I had read a few logs pointing out how easy it was to spot, especially in the winter time, so it was a miracle it lasted as long as it did. I added a new logbook and then had second thoughts about leaving the cache in the spot it was in. I ended up taking it down and moving it 20 feet (or so) south where the vegetation was a little thicker. If it survives the summer, I plan to go back and improve the camo on it.

Once I exited the woods, I decided to take a walk around the nearby man-made lake. This is a cool spot, with two fountains and assorted geese and turtles in the area. It seems to be a popular fishing spot as well.

[ The "Lake" at Howard McVay Park ]

After getting back in my car, I figured I'd hunt a few more caches. I had problems getting my car to start, though, and took that as a sign to just go home and log my finds.