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.