In Loving Memory of....

With some free time this past Saturday morning, minnie mouse and I went just north of Fulton, KY to complete a difficult multi called In Loving Memory of....  With the difficulty and chance of rain in the area, it would be the only find for us on that day.

Cache is back to some of the basics of land navigation, the cache owner is from a military background.  In Army land navigation, no one really goes at it alone, using a second person or more to pace the distance and help line up the azimuth.  With modern GPS, one person can do this alone.

First stages were most part straight forward with completion of math problems.  My smartphone has a good calculator and made easy work of the first stages.  Last stage was a bit of a challenge, I had to Google a "Smoot" and saw it is 5 feet and 7 inches.  I multiplied the inches of the amount of "smoots" and determined the total inches and then divided it by 12 to obtain the number of feet.  At the next to last location, I had to waypoint project, something I have not learned on my Garmin 62s, but I used the Sigh n' Go feature, to get very close to the degrees to at least get me in the ballpark.  We came up to two trees and each of us searched the trees and found the cache.  Being the number of smoots was 202 feet, I told minnie mouse that if we could not get the accurate bearing, we would go out 202 feet from the 3rd stage and make a circle searching obvious locations.  I also told her that if we had flopped at the first three stages, we would have circled the outskirts of the cemetery finding the hint for the final stage "Steele" and search from there.  Nevertheless, we did find the cache in the way the cache owner wanted.  It was a fun cache and hope to see more like it.  

Cache owner is new to the game and he will learn that the more difficult or more stages, the less number of people will come to find it.  I will admit that a cache like that, if not within 50 miles of home, or on a regularly travelled route, I tend to ignore.

Passing of a friend

Yesterday afternoon I learned of the passing of JoGPS.  As Tiger130 illustrated her Facebook page, JoGPS was the Godfather of Geocaching.  While I may have passed JoGPS in the number of finds, I will never catch up to what he has done for this game both directly and indirectly.  Since yesterday afternoon, I have seen countless newsfeeds on Facebook both individual pages and group pages of what JoGPS was for the game and the impact on their lives.

I have heard that there will not be a public funeral but a geocaching event possibly the weekend of June 13th.

Coloring in more counties

As I go on trips, I attempt to color in counties where I go and most recent trips I have extended my county range to just east of Little Rock, Arkansas and into Mississippi.  For the most part, I have colored every county with 2 and 1/2 hours from home.

Another Gulf Coast trip

My family wanting another trip to the beaches of the Gulf Coast.  Last October, we visited Panama City Beach, FL.  This go around, we went to Orange Beach, AL.  Overall, I was not very impressed with Orange Beach, but due to funds, we were not able to obtain a hotel or condo on or very hear the water and instead, we found a condo a little less than a mile from a public beach.  While the house was very nice and quiet neighborhood, traffic was heavy at the nearby Wal-Mart and the public beach was not much to write home about.

We drove overnight and didn't stop at any caches along with way.  I am not very fond of night caching and beside my entourage was two vehicles and I was the only competative cacher onboard.  After entering Alabama on Highway 45, we stayed in a downpour all the way to the Orange Beach area.

I was mostly excluded from the planning process of this trip and therefore my cache plotting centered around where we would be staying and route to and from.  I picked Highway 45 over I-65 for a couple of reasons.  I knew that I-65 would be full of trucks which causes anxiety among the passangers in my vehicle.  I was also somewhat aware of Highway 45 since I've taken that route a couple of times going back and forth from Camp Shelby, MS on Army National Guard convoys.  Thankfully, the route was good with very limited construction and very few large trucks.

While in the area we did visit the beaches and finding that Gulf Shores is a better location than Orange Beach, the public beach was one of the best I've seen.

On the return trip we visited the USS Alabama Memorial Park in Mobile, AL and Elvis Presley's birthplace in Tupalo, MS.

Some of the notable caches we completed:

Oldest cache in Mississippi:  Bonita Lakes .  I know have my signature on the oldest caches in Tennessee, Texas, Arkansas and Mississippi.

A virtual at the US Navy Aviation museum.

Virtual at Fort Barrancas

Cache near the USS Alabama

A cache that leads up to the birthplace and childhood home of Elvis Presley.