Morton Fox's journal

This weekend was a bit cooler than previous weekends, with high temperatures in the 80s. Cloudy too. Early Saturday morning, I headed out to Borderline Restaurant in Bethlehem for the Lehigh Valley Geocachers breakfast event. (which always seems to be on the same day as DE Furbowl for some reason and unfortunately, I can't go to both for reasons of practicality.) This time, it was a breakfast buffet so I had bacon, more bacon, and some fruit to make it healthy. :) After that, our group geocache outing was to New Hope. That was quite a long trip because from Bethlehem, New Hope was about an hour's drive away with no highways. We did some geocaches outside of the downtown area first. When we tried to do the downtown New Hope geocaches, we ran into the problem of not finding anywhere to park there. New Hope is very crowded on the weekends because it is an artsy/cultural town with lots of restaurants. We ended up using paid parking just outside of town and walked 3/4 of a mile into town. After a break for Italian ice, I left the group and went off on my own. I geocached my way towards Doylestown and from there, I went home.

On Sunday, I went down the usual way to Maryland. I started late because I had to take care of something important that morning and since I wanted to tackle some challenging geocaches, I planned only a few for the day. But I did 25 geocaches anyway! "Home sweet abandoned home" was the most challenging one of the day. Parking seemed especially dubious because I had to carefully park diagonally on uneven ground at a street corner between a stop sign and some cut logs. There was no proper parking. Then I climbed up a weedy embankment and bushwhacked straight in. I should have looked around a bit more before entering the woods because there was a bit of a trail to the cache site, but I thought my way was still faster. Anyway, because of those difficulties and possibly the rural location, it's no surprise why that geocache hasn't had many visitors.

My next feat was apparently mind-reading. "Can you see me?" was a brand-new geocache listed that very morning. When I arrived at the coordinates, I saw the problem immediately. The coordinates were right in the middle of a parking lot and obviously incorrect. I looked around nearby for a little while with no success. I figured I might as well take a look at the rest of the lot just in case, so I took a walk along the edges of the property. On the other side of the building, I came across a cluster of trees that seemed right for some reason. So I peeked in there and saw the cache! The coordinates were 300 feet off and not even within line of sight from the correct location, so it felt pretty good to figure this out. I can't really explain how I knew. It was probably a combination of using subtle hints that I gleaned from the cache description and looking for places where I'd hide a cache myself.

Fueled by those successes, I took a stab at more geocaches around Abingdon that I'd missed on previous trips. I noticed a few that were missing had been replaced by the cache owners, so I did those. Then I continued through Kingsville, Perry Hall, Carney, and Towson. Other than having to deal with heavy traffic as I approached Baltimore, I didn't have any further problems. I met the cache owner's brother at "Paul's Plant Stand". He told me that he had seen some folks search over an hour for a cache that I spotted as soon as I parked the car. Here, experience mattered. I told him that I'd seen one of those just a few weeks before. Nevertheless, it was a creative way to hide a geocache in plain sight.

( The caches... )