Lancaster IV

Sunny and 85°F. A heat wave for this time of the year. 4th geocaching trip to Lancaster! I'm a regular now. :) This time, we took on some of the more difficult caches along Route 41 and US-30, and then went around the north side of the town. I was very lucky at "Tree Ornament". It's a tiny cache hanging in the tree but I saw it in just a minute. "Cache or Cash" was tough too but only because it was over 70 feet from ground zero so I had to look around quite a bit of the area. "United We Stand, One Nation" was another one that could've been tough but I somehow went to the correct spot and figured out how it was hidden. "Christiana Two-Step" was quite difficult because we didn't expect it to be placed the way it was. I also thought that it went against cache placement guidelines but that's a matter for the local geocache approver. At "Tree Stomper X2", a multi-cache, I was able to skip the first stage and find the final stage right away. I happened to notice a likely hiding spot on my way to the first stage and decided to check it. Lo and behold, that's where the cache was!

The most interesting cache of the day was "Happy Cache". The first stage held the combination for the lock on the cache. Then I had to go into an enormous Wal-Mart to find the cache at the McDonald's restaurant inside the Wal-Mart. It's a nice setup. Since the restaurant people know about the cache and since the cache is locked, it can be placed in a rather obvious manner and still be safe.

There's a note about a nasty neighbor in the cache description for "my mom plays bridge". I hate this kind of confrontation but I knew what to do from lots of experience with nasty neighbor problems on Long Island. I simply skirted the issue by parking on an adjacent side street and walking to the park access point. They didn't see me park at the dead-end so I could just be anyone from the area entering the park.

( The caches... )