Morton Fox's journal

Sunny, 57-64°F. Today's geocaching trip was sponsored by Groupon! Well, not quite. What happened was they recently sent me a $10 bonus. So I scanned the whole region looking for a suitable Groupon deal to use that $10 bonus on. I found a $20-for-$10 deal at Hot Breads, a bakery in North Wales, so that's what I got. So the primary goal of today's trip was to visit that bakery and use the Groupon deal. Of course, I did a few geocaches on the way there. Then I stopped at Hot Breads and picked up a big bag of bread, toast, and snacks. Not bad for a free Groupon! Hot Breads is an Indian fusion bakery, so the snacks are curry-filled pastries and the bread is masala-flavored. I'm refrigerating the baked goods and reheating those as needed. That should take care of breakfast for at least a week.

After that, I went geocaching around North Wales, Upper Gwynedd, Lansdale, and Colmar. I'd been through the area recently, so this time, I tried some of the harder geocaches. The most difficult one turned out to be a cache that wasn't meant to be difficult. Apparently, a non-geocacher stumbled across "Alex's Excursion", took it, and tossed it about 130 feet from ground zero. I gave up looking for it but then I saw it by chance as I was leaving the park.

I also found the final caches for two puzzles. "What's At Stake? #18 - Sweepstakes" is a logic puzzle, which I like to do ever since I found out that I could do those. :) "Charis Industria" is a simple research puzzle once you find out what the name refers to.

( The caches... )

Groupon is a daily deals website selling gift certificates to local businesses at typically a 50% discount. They were the ones with the controversial Tibetan fish curry Super Bowl commercial. I was skeptical about Groupon because their offers were usually for tanning, spa treatments, designer clothing, fancy restaurants, hotel rooms less than 20 miles from home, and many other things that were useless to me. One day though, they had a deal for New Castle Farmers Market gift certificates. Now, that's more my speed! So I paid my $10 and got in on the deal.

Almost right away, I got the $20 voucher. It was delivered online and I printed it off the website. Then I had to wait a few days to use it because the farmers market wasn't open until Friday. The printout explained the procedure. I needed to visit the market office on the upper level to exchange the voucher for four $5 gift certificates. That's actually pretty handy because this way, I didn't have to use all $20 at a single store at once. I can pick four different stores in the market if that's what I wanted. The clerk knew right away why I was up at the office. He had a long list (4 pages) of names of people who had bought that Groupon deal. He found my name in the list, checked it off, and handed me the gift certificates and a map of the market.

I used one of the $5 certificates this evening to buy 8lbs of oranges. Produce isn't too expensive at the market but 50% off makes everything really cheap. I decided to save the other three certificates for another time since these are valid for six months.