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.