7 Souvenirs of August Challenge

Like last year, Groundspeak decided to stimulate caching activity in the hottest month of the year by initiating another geocaching challenge.  Unlike last year's challenge that require cachers to find at least one cache a day for the 31 days in August, this years challenge was relatively simple.

This year's challenge involved finding 6 different types of caches.  You get a souvenir for each type plus a 7th souvenir if you manage to get all 6 cache types.  Some categories only had one type of cache like traditional or multicache, where other categories had more than one qualifying type, allowing you to choose betwee, for instance, letterbox and webcam caches.

I started the challenge on August 1st (Friday), finding a traditional cache and attending an event cache.

7 Souvenirs of August Meet and Greet by txgo4fan | GC58M41 earned me a "Socialzer" souvenir.

Mmm Chicken by moose16285 | GC4XT25 earned me an "Explorer" souvenir.

On Sunday, I set out to get and Earthcache, a Letterbox cache, a Puzzle cache, and possibly a Multicache.  If I had been successful, I would have finished the challenge relatively quickly.  But it was a hot, miserable day with plenty of mishaps.  I struck out on the Letterbox cache in Shelby Farms.  Of course it was there somewhere since it was found a few days later.

Next, I went after a puzzle cache from my list of several I had pre-solved.  I went after three of the "Office Space" caches in Germantown and struck out for various reasons.  Mishaps included dropping my phone at one and having to backtrack to find out.  I did manage to hit paydirt on the fourth puzzle cache I went after.


Nothing Up My Sleeve   by tinksdad01 | GC4N6MH - earned me the "Puzzler" souvenir.

Finally, I attempted to get one of the two earthcaches that were within a twenty mile drive.  I skipped over the one in Chucalissa in South Memphis to get an isolated one in North Mississippi.

The Mississippi Delta by dameetro | GC3NFQA - earned me the "Nature Lover" souvenir.  I had found a traditional cache at this same spot, so I at least knew where I had to go.

Four down, two to go.  I thought about taking off of work on Wednesday to get the final caches needed to complete the challenge because of rain predicted for the weekend (and the next weekend).  I did some research and found a virtual cache, a letterbox cache and several easy looking multicaches in Tupelo, MS that didn't appear to involve going into the woods.  I then took a chance that the weather would be good enough for me to make a trip to Tupelo on Saturday, August 8.

Saturday came and I overslept a bit, but I didn't really need to rush.  It was about 100 miles to Tupelo and I made it there by 10:30am.  I headed to the Elvis Presley birthplace museum and got the letterbox cache on my list as well as a nearby multicache.

Elvis Presley's Birthplace by Gyrocacher | GC48EFY - earned me the "Collector" souvenir.


Elvis Presley: Assembly of God by Gyrocacher | GC59Q4D - earned me the final souvenir I needed - the "Sightseer" souvenir

 On my way out of town, I diverted north to the Natchez Trace Parkway to get a virtual cache event though I no longer needed to.

Twentymile Bottom by Salvo | GC8F1D - was an alternate qualifier for the "Collector" souvenir.

On the way back out I stopped at the Natchez Trace Parkway Visitor's Center and found one more cache - 

Visitors Welcome by Natchez Trace Pkwy | GC3T7CJ 

When I got back to my computer, I saw that I had earned the "Achiever" souvenir, making me the 6,350th person to do so.  Now I can relax. 

Summer Road Trip 2014

I attempted to complete my attempt to find caches in all contiguous counties on my way to and from Oregon (from Tennessee).  I only needed one county (in Oklahoma) on my usual route out west, so I had made tentative plans to cut north into Kansas to make progress on an alternate route.  I was effectively prevented from doing this by strong storms in Kansas predicted for the day I was to arrive so I stayed to the south and found a few random caches on that route.

On the way back east, I only needed caches in Missouri counties.  I found a few caches along the route before hitting Missouri.  Somewhere along the vacation, I lost the list of counties in Missouri I needed to hit, so after I found caches in the northwest corner of Missouri, I simply tried to get as many counties along I-70 as I could.  As you can tell by looking closely at the Missouri map, I only appear to have missed one county (near St. Louis).  Pretty good considering I got there around the morning rush hour.

I added 10 counties to my list:  1 in Oklahoma to close my southern (east to west) route.  1 in Colorado, and 9 in Missouri to almost close my northern (west to east) route.  If I get another chance to make this trip, I'll try to hunt more counties in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado to try and close that route.

Geocaching Maker Madness Event - 3/30/2014

I decided to take some time off from doing nothing to attend an event in Germantown, TN's Cameron Brown Park.  This event, which awarded a souvenir, was designed to honor the people who take the time and effort to place great geocaches.  The host was wrath557 and the guest speakers were magicrock and abiectio.  We learned about camo caches and puzzle caches.  A good time was had by all.

Afterwards, I teamed up with Ham-R-Hed, bitbrain, and bevofan to tackle At The End Of My Rope by tinksdad01 | GC4QA8T.  I almost found the cache by myself, but ended up missing the mark.  This cache earned one of my "coveted" favorite points amd I wish I could describe the experience without spoiling it for others who haven't found it.  As we were about to leave the cache site, another cacher came along so we entertained ourselves by watching here struggle to find it.

On the way out of the park, I got one more find - Where Young Folks Play by ProntoPup | GC4VVQY to end my day.  There was another event nearby, but I'd had enough fun for one day.

W. C. Johnson Park - 12/28/2013

It's hard to believe we are at the end of another year. It's even harder to believe that it has been an entire month since I hunted a geocache.  On this day, I was fortunate to be able to get together with my geocaching buddy jbgreer for a nice hunt in a nice Collierville park.  Almost all of the caches we hunted on this trip were placed this year and I had been waiting for cold weather to hunt them.

After enjoying a nice breakfast, we headed to Collierville, TN and made it to W. C. Johnson Park by 10:30am.  We headed out on the boardwalk into the woods and it started to sprinkle almost immediately.  We had also made the decision not to wear waterproof boots, which on this day turned out to be an excellent decision.

We found ten caches in the woods - nine were by peanutpapa and one was by tiger130.  All were great caches and easily findable.  After leaving the woods we decided to tackle one more cache - Johnson Park Pavilion by rebeldawg | GC47KDY.  This one had evaded me over the summer and on this day as well.  Fortunately, jbgreer did a better job of searching the hiding spot than I did.  We were done by 2pm or so and headed back to Memphis.

[I'll flesh this out a little more - maybe tomorrow.]

9 Years of Geocaching - 11/26/2013

This week was not only Thanksgiving week, but it marked the end of my ninth year of gecaoching.  I 'celebrated" by hunting a couple of caches on my way to Thanksgiving dinner, becuase I mistakenly thought the anniversary date was 11/28.  My bad. 

I had plans to get 4 caches. including a puzzle cache I had solved earlier.  I managed to leave home without my GPSr so my phone had to do for navigation.  I missed the first two caches on my list because I missed a turn and I was running a little behind schedule.  The two caches I did manage to get to were worth the hunt event though I found both fairly quickly.

THE WRATH OF ROCK by magicrock | GC4NYQJ - The puzzle was based on Start Trek II: The Wrath of Khan trivia.  Some answers I knew, others were found on the internet.  Since I didn't have my GPS, I couldn't enter new coordinates on my phona app (as far as I know), so I have to guide myself with the tiny numbers on the app that show current location.  Excellent cache - as anyone who has hunted magicrock caches can attest to.

Rocky Branch by sailemstable | GC2582B  - I used Google Street View to look at the cache area and a spolier pic to identify the cache.  Still, it was a cool cache!  The dog mentioned on the cache page didn't come out, I imagine because he was too busy begging for turkey scraps.

I'm sure I have mentioned this somewhere before, but my first cache find was on 11/26/2004 and was Overton Park Magnetic Wood!? by Spencersb | GCKAX7.  I found it with my caching buddy jbgreer and without the benefit of my own GPS unit.

Caching in Union City, TN - 9/15/2013

Most of my recent excursions have been to Arkansas to the west or Mississippi to the south.  It has been a while since I visited northwest Tennessee.  The first thing I had to do was adjust my pocket query for that area because it has a lot more caches to pick from since my last visit.  The second thing to do was target a specific area.  I have cached in Union City once before along with the surrounding towns and enjoyed my visit.  This time I wanted to focus on Union City itself because it had close to 40 caches in a relatively small area.

{ Beautiful day for geocaching ]

I set out early Sunday morning, just before sunrise.  The weather was nice and cool.  The one thing I did not expect, though, was fog.  It slowed me down a bit and I had to be really careful until after the sun rose and the fog burned off. 

I made a few stops along the way.  Because I took Hwy 51, there is only one rest stop near Henning that I used to organize my maps for the day.  I found ROOTS' --easy micro by lookingUPward | GC4099P in Henning shortly after.  A police car parked by me as I was about to leave the cache site, but he didn't stop me for anything.

I stopped to get an easy cache at a Confederate memorial site in Trimble that had some of the nicest scenery on the trip.  After I signed the log, some dude in a pickup parked near me and sat there while I walked around the area taking pictures.  Creeped me out a bit.

Continuing north, I picked up two caches in Troy before arriving in Union City around 9am - at least an hour later than I had planned.

I hit all of the caches from west to east along Reelfoot Avenue early, which was good because later the traffic was crazy.  I then found most of the caches in the center of town before going after the caches in the Veteran's park at the north end of town.

[ I turned my phone back on for a moment to take this one picture of the Veterans Park. ]

I started running into one technical problem after another as the day progressed.  Because my GPSr maps chip is damaged, I was using my phone for autorouting.  Before I covered a third of the caches, my battery was down to 11 percent and I ended up turning it off.  This also cost me the ability to read cache descriptions and logs.  My GPSr, a Garmin 60csx had no maps, so I had to rely on the compass - like I did as a beginner.  I had paper maps to help me a little, but I didn't have many notes written because I was becoming more reliant on my phone.  I didn't have my camera along because I had started to rely more on my phone to take pictures.  Lessons learned for sure on this trip.  These things slowed me down a little, but I still had a lot of fun.  Most all of the caches were low difficulty/terrain so I didn't get too frustrated.  I also got talk to a woman about geocaching.  She had seen many people visit a particular spot looking for something, and she picked this day to finally ask somebody what was going on.  I dislike encounters like that normally, but we had a nice talk before I had to move on.

I had a late lunch at a Subway before heading back south the same way I came in.  I picked up a few more caches in Dyersburg before ending my day.

Caching in Holly Springs, MS - 9/1/2013

I've been waiting for cooler weather to make a cache run on Oxford, MS.  Holly Springs is a small town that is on the way to Oxford rom Memphis.  It had seven caches that looked like park and grabs, so I made plans to go early Sunday morning before it go too hot and clear out these caches, so I wouldn't need to hunt them on my Oxford trip.

I arrived in Holly Springs around 7am and hit the southern most cache first and worked my way north.

Sounds Of Thunder   by Hammer Down | GC24TP7 - was just outside of a race track.  I resisted a sign's invitation to race around the track and just hunted the cache.

Next up - the town Wal Mart cache.


Wally Micro  by Riverwolf | GC1FQ2V - a guardrail cache that I found on the ground after almost giving up the search.  Its hide spot had a holder for the cache, but it wasn't effective.

Starving To Death V2 by lacey38655 | GC27268 - Easy Park and Grab that was just out of the way enough to not have to worry about watchers.

A cemetery cache was next.


Hillcrest Cemetry of Holly Springs, MS   by Scooby-Doo Crew | GC2RGXR - This was a beautiful cemetery with a cache near an entrance.  The hint confused me at first but the container was actually big enough to spot once I interpreted the hint correctly.

The South Reporter by moondg | GC1FM75  - Simply awesome and the best part of the trip!  The cache page has spoiler pictures, but seeing the cache itself was cool.

Mississippi Blues Trail : Hill Country Blues  by MS Blues Trail Geocache Committee | GC2TD3K - The cache was missing so I attempted to replace it because I am trying to log at least 25 Blues trail caches around the state.

Marshall County Historical Museum   by Scooby-Doo Crew | GC2T03Z - Nice easy hide to end the morning on. 

I wasted no time after getting back to my car and made it home well before lunch time.  I hardly broke a sweat for a change.