Morton Fox's journal

This weekend was the opening of the First State Challenge, the annual state-wide geocaching challenge. The rules have been tweaked a bit. This year, to qualify for the prize, one has to find 7 out of 9 caches in each region (North, Central, and South). Beyond the challenge, it's a chance to learn more about the state as each cache description contains a write-up of either the history or geography of the location. There were a few places I'd never seen before, such as Carey's Camp, a church camp meeting site in Millsboro, and the Weldin ruins. Also rather interesting was "FSC-2014 Middletown Dead Poets", which takes you to two filming locations of Dead Poet's Society, a Robin Williams movie.

I finished most of the FSC on Saturday and only needed 3 more caches from the western side of Sussex County, which I didn't have time to cover. I got those on Sunday and actually finished the remaining two I didn't need because I wanted to see those locations. Ran into many of the local geocachers along the way since everyone was going for these caches the same weekend. After finishing the challenge, I still had time so since I was already in the southeastern corner of the state, I went for more caches in Fenwick Island and Ocean City. That's one area I rarely get to since it's pretty far from home.

( The caches... )

Saturday was supposed to be rainy with tornadoes and other nasty stuff. My guess was Southern Delaware would be the last to be hit by the storm since that was the case last weekend. So I decided to see how far down the state I can geocache before rain forced me to turn back. Surprisingly, I was able to go all the way to Lewes before the rain started and I got there after finishing geocaches around Dover, Little Creek, Slaughter Beach, and Broadkill Beach. The "Slaughter Beach Series" geocaches took less time than I thought. "Slaughter Beach Series - Delaware Ave" is a 5-stage multicache. However, I noticed that the first stage was on North Delaware Ave and wondered if there was a South Delaware Ave too. Well, that's where the final stage was! So I ended up just going there and finding the cache without GPS. The layout of the beach area helped too. The town is just a series of short streets off the main road, so if you know which street the cache is on, you can just hunt around the beach access area at the end of that street.

Sunday morning was sunny but a lot cooler than Saturday. I noticed a new series of geocaches along the Union Transportation Trail in Cream Ridge in Monmouth County, NJ, so I headed off to do those. It's a 4-mile bike path, which means an 8-mile round trip walk, with geocaches placed roughly every 0.1-0.3 of a mile. Out of the 32 geocaches on the trail, I found 30. The remaining two were hidden in such a way that those would've taken more time than I had to find, so I left those for another time. All in all, it was a good long walk. I parked in the middle, walked to the north end and back, and walked to the south end and back. Ran into some geocachers along the way too, although we only teamed up on two caches.

After I was done with the UTT, I did a few (well, six!) quick geocaches around the area. "Borrowed Genius" was the most amazing one of all. This cache is inside a tube. The trick is you need to bring a battery to run a motor to get the cache out of the tube. I actually didn't fully understand how it operated until I got home and saw some pictures on the construction of this cache. For dinner, I felt like going to Ruby Tuesday so I went to find "PMC Lite - Banned Books", a puzzle cache that is next door to Ruby Tuesday in Mount Laurel. I'd actually been waiting for this cache for quite some time. I was last there in April and confirmed that it was missing. Then it took five months for the landscaping and construction in that section of the strip mall to finish. (A Borders bookstore was turning into an AAA office and auto repair garage.) The cache owner had to wait until things settled down before putting out the replacement cache. However, since I had all the information, including guidance from the cache owner on where to look for the cache, from back in April, it was a snap to find it tonight. And after that, I had salad.

( The caches... )

On Saturday, I headed downstate for the Mid-Summer's Cache Luncheon, a geocaching event at Rudy's Diner in Harrington. I thought it was a good event for meeting up with fellow geocachers from around the state, but we may have seriously underestimated attendance because the party room was packed! I had a pork roll & cheese sandwich. After that, we headed out to do all the new geocaches that had been placed for the event. Even though it was a rainy afternoon, we had a lot of fun dashing around the town. I did some of the geocaches with the group and some on my own. In the evening, I went back to Wilmington for DE Furbowl 38. I was a bit late to the event, so I didn't bowl this time. However, I still fursuited a bit, talked to friends, joined the group photo, and had a good time overall.

I wasn't sure if it was going to rain on Sunday, so I decided not to travel too far from home. I did some geocaches around West Chester, Exton, and Downingtown that I'd been saving for just such a day. Actually, a number of those geocaches were from a recent event that I didn't attend. In the end, it didn't rain and so the best part of the day was a hike in Marsh Creek State Park to finally visit the two geocaches on the west side of the lake. This hike would've been better in the fall (for temperature and scenery) but I can never tell when I'll be back.

( The caches... )

Sunny, 45°F. I wanted to go to Hardee's for dinner so I planned the whole day to end up at the Middletown Hardee's! That meant a geocaching trip downstate. Even though I spent the whole day in-state (except for a brief cross over to Maryland for "Conditioned Response at C&D canal"), I saw and did a lot. First, I finished the color series (Green, Red, Blue, and final. I found the Silver cache yesterday.), which included a 1.6-mile walk on the bike path in Newark. Then I went to the C&D Canal Wildlife Refuge for four geocaches. (I'm still wondering about the helium tank I came across there.)

After leaving the canal, I did a bunch of suburban geocaches in Smyrna, Dover, Wyoming, and Leipsic. "can you smell it?" was next to a horse stable, so it's obvious what odor the cache description was referring to. Oddly, I didn't smell anything. I may have gotten used to it after many visits to Lancaster. :)

"Jaxon's First" was the last cache of the day and it was an easy one to find in the dark. After that, I went to Hardee's in Middletown and had a Southwest Patty Melt.

( The caches... )

There were lots of 11-11-11 geocaching events posted on Friday. It was a work day for me and I didn't take the day off but I still managed to attend two of those events anyway. The first event I attended was "11-11-11 at 11am - Let's Eat Lunch!" at Cafe Napoli in Wilmington. I figured I could take an extended lunch break and head out for this one since it's not too far from the office. I had a fish fillet sandwich and onion rings.

That night, I went for the "11-11-11 @ 11:11:11 PM New Jersey" geocaching event. Of course, since I wasn't out the whole day geocaching, I had dinner at home first before going to Jersey. The event was a simple gathering in the parking lot at a strip mall one block away from the Deptford Mall. We've had night gatherings in that parking lot a few times already and I'm surprised that mall security has never showed up to question a large group of people hanging out there at night. I also did two geocaches that night. "Big Ole Trees Around Here" has been in place for a few years already but I couldn't do it in previous years because it has either been too late or too dark. Well, this time, it was too late AND too dark but I went and found the cache anyway!

Saturday was a low-key day since I started out late and I had two errands to take care of first. I just headed down to Kent County to do some geocaches that were placed recently. Then I did a bunch of older geocaches in the Milford Neck Wildlife Refuge before returning to Middletown for dinner at Hardee's. I had a taco salad because there was a special on that posted in the window. I don't usually order from the Red Burrito side of their menu but I think I should start because their taco salad is pretty good.

( The caches... )

It was a pleasant weekend, generally. Both days were 60-65°F and sunny. I wanted this weekend to be low-key since I was a bit tired of long-distance travel and big cache runs, but we know how that usually ends up. On Saturday, I wanted to attend the "Cachers of the Corn II" geocaching event near Lancaster. So I went to Lancaster during the day and did some of the Battleship series and mixed that with other geocaches along the way. Started near Gap and somehow ended up in Ephrata/Akron, quite a bit further from the event than intended! In the evening, I went to the event site to meet up with FishBizkit, sign in, and drop off some geocoins. I couldn't stay to do the corn maze itself though because I had to get to dinner. I returned in-state to Ruby Tuesday in Pike Creek because from experience, the Ruby Tuesday in Lancaster isn't as good.

On Sunday, I decided to do some geocaches in Central and Southern Delaware as a change of pace, so I don't get sick of Lancaster. My original plan was to only do the caches until Dover/Camden but I had so much time left before sunset that I decided to continue to Georgetown to do a new cache on the Del Tech Owens Campus and hike a state wildlife area just outside that town. With sunset coming a lot earlier this time of year, I had plenty of time not only for dinner (chicken and fries at Hardee's in Middletown) but also a bit of shopping afterwards to pick up some sale items I noticed in the Sunday paper ads and coupons.

I'm seeing a bunch of fake bird geocaches these days. I saw two on Sunday and this dove-like container was one of them. Even if not particularly challenging, these are pretty neat. The idea is to stick the log sheet into the bird and clip or hang the bird on a tree branch. Then it looks like a bird in the tree and passers-by who don't look closely will be none the wiser.

( The caches... )

Sunny, 80°F. After work, I headed out to the C&D Canal Wildlife Area in St Georges and found 55 geocaches! The C&D Canal Speed Trail is a power trail that just got published this afternoon. It was 54 geocaches, 53 micro-sized and 1 regular, plus 1 bonus puzzle cache at the end. All of them were spaced 0.1 to 0.2 of a mile apart on the same dirt road next to the canal. So it was really part endurance test and part seeing how many of these you can do per hour. I didn't keep track of the time but I think I did the whole lot in about an hour and a half.

The first one, "C&D 01", took the longest because it's at an odd dead end and I had to turn the car around after that. After doing a few, I got into a bit of a rhythm getting out of the car, grabbing the cache, using tweezers to extract the log, signing the log, putting the cache back, and driving off to the next one 0.1 mile down the road. There were only a few caches in the series where I had to think for more than a second: one cache site had 3 likely spots, another cache was in a bush instead of at the base of the nearby pole. But for nearly all the caches, the GPS didn't leave the dashboard because I knew where it was as soon as I pulled up to the site.

Other things: I got a splinter from one of the poles. Got scratched by a bush I was searching. Came across a flock of vultures. Talked to strangers who thought I was collecting driftwood. And did the whole series in sandals because every cache was by the side of the dirt road. (There was one where I had to hop over a mud patch but I'd still consider that roadside.) After that, I went to Hardee's in Middletown for chicken tenders. At the canal access point, I was close enough to Middletown, so I might as well take the opportunity.

( The caches... )

Sunny, 60-65°F. This afternoon, I returned to the south side of the C&D Canal to continue what I was doing two days ago. This time, I accessed the canal road from St. Georges, near the US-13 bridge. Then I drove for a few miles on the road at the edge of the canal. I actually caught up with this ship, which was probably going at a mere few miles per hour.

The first geocache of the day was C&D Mayhem Cache #3 Gamerboy's Junket. I was wondering if there was a problem with this cache because the last log was a DNF. However, the problem turned out to be one of inaccurate coordinates and I found it when I examined the other side of the thicket. Next, I went for Cat Tails. For this one, I had to park the car and take a walk because the dirt road didn't pass near the cache site. And finally, I proceeded to A.C.C.E.N.T. #2 Warm Fuzzies from Maryland. This one was quite a challenge because it's in a swamp. However, the biggest hurdle was psychological. It turns out that the swamp was only a few inches deep. Once I stepped in and saw that, I simply walked around in the water until I found the cache. It was quite an adventure.

After that, it was time to leave the C&D Canal Wildlife Area. I drove back out to St. Georges at sunset. Dinner was a bacon cheeseburger at TGI Friday's in New Castle. They sent me a $7 coupon, so this is how I used it. It's a nice restaurant but they've got to stop using those 20-watt light bulbs. I had to ask for a table in a brighter part of the dining area.

Cloudy, 50-60°F. I fell asleep last evening while waiting for the laundry to finish, so I woke up pretty early in the morning. After taking care of some things I needed to do, including the laundry, I thought I'd go for a Hardee's breakfast since I'm not usually up early enough to be there in time for breakfast. So I went to the Middletown Hardee's and had a sausage and egg biscuit and a caramel crumb biscuit. The latter was the coupon freebie.

Since I was out and about early, I figured I ought to tackle the farthest geocaches in the state. (I'm saving the nearest caches for when I head out late.) So my goal for the day was "FI Sound Church Cache", near the southeast corner of the state. That ended up being the 5th cache of the day because it was a long drive and of course I had to do a few along the way. After that, I geocached in Ocean View, Bethany Beach, Dewey Beach, and Rehoboth Beach before heading off to dinner at Hardee's again, this time in Smyrna. I had a Texas toast bacon cheese thickburger.

Lots of interesting cache hiding techniques today. Of those, I think "and the forecast for St. Louis is......" and "Dewey Beach Compass" were the two most unusual ones. I'm still wondering how the cache hider for the latter set it up without attracting a lot of attention. I also did a webcam cache "Bethany Beach Webcam". (A webcam cache has no cache container to find. Instead, the objective is to position yourself within view of the webcam and save the webcam image to upload with your cache log. Most geocachers do that by calling someone else for assistance in saving the webcam image.) I noticed that there was wi-fi internet at the beach, so I brought the netbook to the boardwalk and saved the webcam image when I was in the webcam picture.

( The caches... )

Rainy then sunny and 75-85°F. This whole exercise started when I noticed that I'd found geocaches on 12 of the 14 pages in the DeLorme maps covering the state. So I figured I might as well attempt to complete the Delaware DeLorme Challenge. I only needed caches in pages 33 and 34 in the southwestern corner of the state to fulfill the requirements. Conveniently, there is a cache, "Mason-Dixon-A3", close to that corner of the state. So that was the first destination I set on the GPS. It's a fascinating location with a benchmark in its own shelter marking the corner in the state line. From there, I went eastwards to Delmar to fill in page 34. Of course, I couldn't resist doing a bunch more geocaches in Delmar, including one on the Maryland side of the town.

My secondary goal for the day was to visit "dElAWare 7{1}", the oldest cache in the state. So after I was done with Delmar, I headed northeast to Trap Pond State Park. The bushwhack in from the road was rather rough but it was worth doing to find this gold-painted ammo box with a special plaque. It used to be a Gladware plastic container but a few years ago, a local geocacher did some cache maintenance and improved the container.

And finally, I visited a bunch of geocaches in Laurel and Seaford to round out the day before having dinner at Hardee's in Harrington.

( The caches... )