Morton Fox's journal

Saturday was the day I tackled the group of 10 geocaches in Birch Run Preserve in the Coatesville area. The first cache nearest the parking area was "Barkley's First Shed", a Wherigo. I figured the Wherigo cartridge would take me pretty much all over the park, so I kept that running while I found the other caches along the way. Incidentally, "shed" here refers to a cast off deer antler, not a small storage structure. Barkley is a dog so until I got partway through the cartridge and saw that the shed was a deer antler, I was wondering what he wanted with a wooden hut! Anyway, doing both the regular geocaches and the Wherigo at the same time worked beautifully, even if I had to make two big detours for geocaches that were somewhat off from the main trail. All in all, the whole hike took about two hours, leaving plenty of time to get more geocaches around Honey Brook, Narvon, East Earl and New Holland before it got dark.

The last stop of the day and dinner was at Shady Maple Smorgasbord in East Earl. Shady Maple is the biggest buffet hall in the area and I'd always been intrigued by this enormous building, a Mecca of Overeating, that rises above the Amish countryside. I felt that I had to experience it at least once and since I was in the area, I went in. The place was packed! There were lines of people, like at an amusement park, just waiting to check in to the buffet. Past the cash registers, it was an old-time affair with curious dioramas and 3-D paintings. Shady Maple boasts of 200 feet of food but it's actually 100 feet of food repeated twice. The first 100 feet of buffet tables is a mirror image of the other 100 feet. I preferred the grilling stations though. I thought the crab cakes were the best but I sampled the seafood and meats from all the grilling stations. Of course, I saved some room for salad (with bacon dressing!) and dessert, which was ice cream cake! Anyway, I thought it was a worthwhile experience but maybe next time, avoid going there on a Saturday evening. I was told that the crowd isn't as bad on other nights.

Sunday's plan was fairly simple. I went geocaching up the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, through Pennsauken, Riverside, Palmyra, Willingboro, and Burlington, towards Florence, where I would end the day at the "Fall Get Together 2016" geocaching event. There was some good river scenery and a nice visit to the Palmyra Cove Nature Center along the way.

( The caches... )

Saturday's trip was to Central and Southern Delaware for two sets of Christmas-themed geocaches. On the way, there was a geocache site next to Frightland, where I saw the skull silo and downed jet. I haven't been to this haunted house attraction before but the downed jet was always an odd thing to see from the highway. The first set of Christmas caches was in Smyrna. There were 10 caches, one for each reindeer and one for Santa Claus himself. All were pretty straightforward. Then there was another set of caches down by Ellendale, including "Fa-la-la-la-la", "Christmas goose", and "Holly Jolly Christmas".

The only real problem of the day was an encounter with two crazy rednecks, a few miles outside of Bridgeville, who apparently didn't like people parking by the side of the road to look for the cache. I'm guessing that was the reason since I wasn't on private property and they didn't actually say what was wrong. My experience with such encounters told me to not escalate the situation and they'll go away after a few minutes, which is pretty much what happened. Aside from that problem though, the day went pretty well. Dinner that night was at the shiny, new Panda Express in Dover. I wasn't even planning to go there but I happened to see it while driving up US-13 and remembered that I had an online coupon. What's funny is I only just got a cookie fortune the previous night that said, "you will meet a panda". Who knew it was prophetic and actually referring to Panda Express? :)

Sunday's trip was to the Florence / Mansfield area in South Jersey to continue where I stopped the previous weekend. "The New Rules Almost Killed Us" series of caches was pretty humorous. Each one was at a cemetery and anyone who dealt with the new NJ State Parks policy would understand the reference. Most of the afternoon was spent around the Mansfield, Cookstown, and New Egypt area. I hadn't been to that pocket of New Jersey in years, so there were quite a lot of caches I hadn't found yet and it'll be worth another trip or two.

( The caches... )

I actually wasn't sure which direction to go for geocaches on Saturday but the Whitehall part of Lehigh Valley looked good. Aside from the urban area, I also went farther north to Laury's Station and Walnutport to hike part of the D&L rail trail. "Message in a Bottle" was one of the geocaches along this trail. When I checked the likely hiding spot though, I saw a snake coiled up inside the hollow log! This is one reason to always look before putting your hand in something. It's only a small snake though and it stayed far back enough so I could still retrieve the cache. The most amusing cache of the day was "Whitehall Zephyr Cache". The cache container looks like a gargoyle, a demon or something like that. It's quite a character.

Sunday was the day I planned to complete the 7 Souvenirs of August. I only needed an event cache and there was an event that afternoon in Florence. I actually hadn't been up that part of South Jersey in a while, so there were lots of new geocaches to do along the way, although not as many new caches as in Pennsylvania. Later that day, during the event, I learnt that a stricter approval process in New Jersey could be the reason. Anyway, it was a good event and after that, I went for some geocaches in and near Florence before going home.

( The caches... )

It was a 3-day weekend but I had only one event to attend, which was "Kayaks and Land Lovers", a flash mob event at the Rock Hill parking area in Marticsville, Lancaster County, on Saturday. That was a nice event of moderate size. I didn't have much planned for afterwards, so I geocached generally around Lancaster. It rained in the afternoon, so I took the opportunity to do "LOST81 (2.5/1.5) Is This A City?" This is a mystery cache that requires a tour around the Park City Center mall to gather information to calculate the final coordinates. So the rain wasn't a problem for that part of it at least.

On Sunday, I did a run to the Telford - Harleysville - Montgomeryville - North Wales area, which seems to repopulate with new geocaches fairly regularly. "The silver bullet" was the most entertaining cache of the day, once I found it and understood what I had to do to retrieve it. No tools or modifications to the cache site; just a creative way to use the structure that was already there. I also visited the most duck-filled pond in Harleysville.

Dinner was a repeat visit to the worst Baja Fresh (Montgomeryville location) I've come across so far. I know I shouldn't return after what I saw on my previous visit but I thought maybe this time, they won't be horrible. On my last visit, I noticed that they were using the toilet plunger from the restroom to fix the salsa bar. On this visit, I saw the staff use the same floor broom, after sweeping the floor, to dust the seats in the dining area. If they do things like that in the dining area in full view of customers, I have to wonder what dubious shortcuts they're taking back in the kitchen. However, I didn't get sick after either visit so I'll keep the complaining to a minimum for now.

On Monday, I went to Willingboro to do even more "Levittown Legacy" geocaches. I'm not sure if this series has really ended since new ones keep showing up. After that, I continued onwards to Beverly, Florence, Bordentown, and Hamilton. I also finally got to log the "31 Day Streak" challenge cache. I didn't have finds on every day in August but the only one I missed was on the 2nd so by Sept 2, I did indeed have a 31-day streak. Funny thing is I didn't intend to do a streak and I didn't save any just-in-case streak-saver caches near home, but new ones popped up almost every day just the same. There were a few close calls though. There was one time when a tree fell at the entrance to a cache site but I was still able to approach by taking a longer walk from another direction. And there was another time when there was a flaming (or at least smoldering) wreck on I-295, which fortunately did not close all the lanes. I have to admit it was nice having some caches to go for every evening after work, although I think I'd get eventually get tired of doing that every day.

( The caches... )

This weekend, I decided to tackle some geocache series that have shown up in Burlington County, NJ, and Kent & Sussex Counties, DE. It's also the first weekend I'm using the Nexus 4 phone, which I'd just gotten mid-week, for geocaching. (although I'd already taken it out for a bunch of caches on Thursday) In addition, I share my thoughts on geocaching streaks. So this journal entry will be a long one. Hang on!

The first cache series I went for on Saturday was the Levittown Legacy series. To my surprise, this series is in New Jersey, not in nearby Levittown, Pennsylvania. (or the other Levittown on Long Island, for that matter) I read the suggested website for the history and it was rather interesting. In short, the Willingboro area was another housing development by Levitt and Sons, Inc, and for a few years, the town was known as Levittown, until the name was changed back to Willingboro. After that, I did the Streak cache series, which was good for another 27 caches, mostly before, but a few after, dinner.

( Streaking? )

On Sunday, after finishing a batch of geocaches in Middletown and Dover, I headed down to the Milford-Harrington stretch of Route 14 for the "Rt 14 C&D" cache series. This is yet another of those cache runs where the caches are all on the side of the road at semi-regular intervals. I guess it's fun sometimes, although I was left wondering if that's what it's like to be a mail carrier. Since some of the caches are on one side of the road and some on the other side, I did all the westbound ones first, stopped at Hardee's in Harrington for a quick lunch and then resumed with the eastbound caches back towards Milford. After that, I did the "Future Tad" series, also the same kind of thing, down by Millsboro and looped my way to Harrington and back north.

( Nexus 4 )

( The caches... )

Saturday was a repeat visit to the Mount Laurel - Burlington - Florence area because I hardly got started on geocaches in Florence last week when I went to the event there. I was moving a bit slowly on Saturday so I'm still not done with the Florence area, but I got most of the caches in Florence Park, at least.

Sunday was the day I went for the Peaslee WMA Trail Part 2. Similar to the first part, it's a series of 50 geocaches placed in the Peaslee wildlife management area along dirt roads and some lightly-used paved roads. I decided I had to do that on Sunday because that's the day of the week when hunting is not permitted. (except for geocache hunting, that is :) ) Also, just like the last time, I ran into other groups of geocachers and joined the team. I was with C.C.Cachers, imoutnabout, and Kia the Wonder Dog for the first dozen or so in the series. Amazingly, the dog found one of the caches. We were looking around for "Peaslee WMA Trail Pt 2 #11" and it started digging at something under the leaves, which turned out to be the well-hidden cache! C.C. explained that Kia knows the scent of other South Jersey geocachers so it can tell where they were. A bit after that, we split up. I caught up with NatureKlutz and xterrokee at #20 and joined that group for the remainder of the series. #20 was the only one of the 50 caches that we could not find, but it may have fallen off the tree and gotten lost.

( The caches... )

Like Christmas, New Year's Day is on a Tuesday, turning that day, New Year's Eve, and the regular weekend into another four-day weekend! It snowed a bit on Saturday but after the snow stopped in the afternoon, I still had enough daylight for a bit of geocaching in the snow over in Newark and Elkton. It wasn't much of a snowfall, so the roads were generally fine. There was only a bit of snow on the ground in wooded areas but even that melted away by the next day.

On Sunday, I continued geocaching in Newark and Elkton. There were over 40 geocaches, all Christmas-themed, placed by Amanda and Knobbie in that area. Most of those caches were ornaments and figurines. It was rather amazing. I continued southwards to Chesapeake City and Cecilton. Finished the day with "Take me out to the ball game....", a challenging 4-stage multicache. Well, it was only challenging because of the icy cold weather but fortunately, I could drive around to the other side of the park to shorten the walk for the last two stages.

After Sunday's outing, I figured that I needed only 13 more geocaches to make December my top month. (beating September 2012's count of 341) That was a snap to do. I went up through Southern NJ, from Woodbury to Riverside, and surpassed that by the early afternoon. That day was my first visit in several years to Palmyra Cove Nature Park, which is known for being the park where if you miss the exit, you end up on the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge to Pennsylvania! However, I saw that they've added a new entrance further from the bridge, so there's not as much danger of that now. It's a nice place to walk and see whitetail deer and wild turkey, which are still active in the winter.

I felt a bit lethargic on New Year's Day, so I decided not to keep it a low-key day. "Grandma's Reindeer", another Amanda & Knobbie cache, was the most amusing cache of the day. It's a toy Grandma in a truck with a reindeer strapped to the bonnet. When you push the button, it moves and plays "Grandma got run over by a Reindeer". After that, I continued on to Central Delaware. There's a series of geocaches, "Hope", "Imagine", "Laugh", and "Live", which I needed to find in order to get the coordinates for "The Wonder of the Geo-Cacher". I could only find "Hope" and "Imagine" because there was fishing activity at the other two spots. Fortunately, it turns out that I didn't need all the information to locate the final cache. With those two digits missing, I only had to search along a 500-foot north-south line. I was able to see the hiding spot from pretty far away, so that was trivial. It was also a good day to tackle "Dino Danny". Ordinarily, the thick brush would make it a 4-star geocache but in the middle of winter, I was able to walk right in, only stopping to clip a few branches here and there.

( The caches... )

This weekend, I went to two geocaching events, a SEPAG picnic in Doylestown on Saturday and a SJG bowling event on Sunday. The weather was hot (90°F), humid and rainy on Saturday but somewhat cooler and less humid on Sunday.

Saturday morning's drive up to "SEPAG Storms the Castle IX" in Doylestown was rather awful. There were traffic delays on the Blue Route but the worst part was an accident I saw on Route 611 in Horsham. Traffic was moving very slowly at that time. A bus was stopped at a bus stop on the side of the road. I noticed an SUV was heading right for the bus. I thought there would be enough time for that SUV to stop but it hit the bus and crunched into the bus in slow motion. That force was enough to shake up the bus. So traffic was delayed for a bit while they got everyone out of those vehicles to safety. After that bit of adventure, the rest of my trip to Central Park in Doylestown was uneventful. The picnic pavilion was packed. There was a lot of food and even a geocaching logo cake. It rained while we were there so most of us waited until the rain stopped before heading out to do the new geocaches in the area. No matter. There was more time to chat and catch up with things that were happening. After the picnic, I did a few geocaches with Spatial Distortion and Stamp My Art. The group hike wasn't really planned; we happened to arrive at the trailhead at around the same time, so why not do those geocaches together? That was fun.

On Sunday morning, I went to Brewster's Pub / Laurel Lanes in Mount Laurel for "SJG Bowls Away the Summertime Blues". It's a lunch geocaching event followed by bowling, although I didn't stay for the bowling part of it because I wanted to go geocaching around Mount Laurel and Berlin. We had a decent buffet table of food but what's remarkable is it was free, courtesy of the bowling alley and pub! SJG's motto is "we don't starve", but it's a good thing that we also do a lot of hiking to burn off those calories. :) Anyway, attendance at this event was lower than the SEPAG picnic but I did get to see some of the South Jersey regulars.

( The caches... )

Sunny, 75-80°F. I didn't have any concrete plans for the day other than that I wanted to start geocaching in Mount Laurel to finish the "I work out!" series and end the day in Berlin so I could go to Long John Silver's for dinner. The remarkable thing about today's software is I don't need to plan any more. The Neongeo app stores all the cache info and downloads more as I go along. I just kept checking it to see what's nearby and in the right direction, and I ended the day with 40 cache finds!

I didn't exactly go in a straight line from start to end. From Mount Laurel, I went through Medford and Marlton, with a side trip to Lumberton. I hadn't been to the area in quite a while so I did clusters of geocaches where available to cut down on the driving. Two parks had 4 or more geocaches I hadn't found. I covered a variety of terrain from sidewalks to woods (with creek crossings) and open fields. There was a frog geocache ("Creek Side Croaker") today too. It's in a fishing area and the nearby fisherman thought I was looking for snakes. I told him I was looking for frogs and that somehow seemed like a credible story too. I also got to see an E-2 Hawkeye at the Air Victory Museum because the "Air Victory" geocache was nearby.

Dinner was at the Long John Silver's / Taco Bell co-branded restaurant in Berlin. I had a two-fish combo and a caramel apple empanada. (Yes, I ordered from both sides of the menu this time.) And finally, I did the last six geocaches of the night on the way from LJS to the I-295 ramp in Barrington.

( The caches... )