Morton Fox's journal

Saturday's trip was first to Upper Freehold, including Clayton Park, Assunpink WMA and Etra Lake Park, before heading over to the Princeton area. I wanted to get in some hiking to get some of the older geocaches in the area before going to the built-up areas for quick caches. A strange thing I found was a panda hanging on a tree. The strange part was it had nothing to do with the geocache, which was nearby, so sometimes one just comes across random stuff in the woods. Also, Clayton Park had a lovely purple field. On closer examination, I saw that it's a dense patch of purple deadnettle. And the flock of guinea fowl in Etra Park in no way hampered the cache search, although they were very noisy.

Sunday's excursion was to get the new geocaches in Leesport, Shoemakersville, and Hamburg, although I did stop in Morgantown, Wyomissing, and Reading along the way. In Centerport, I arrived at a fork in the road! The town has a good sense of humor.

( The caches... )

Saturday's trip was to Allentown, NJ, to take a 5-mile walk and get another set of geocaches on the northern part of the Union Transportation Trail. This section of the UTT is not yet connected to the section I walked on last week. I hope they'll one day finish converting the railbed into a bike path and join the two sections. Ran into SanMar again during my walk. This time though, they were a bit earlier and were on their way back as I was walking towards the end of the path.

Sunday's trip was to Eastern Shore Maryland, around Still Pond, Chestertown, Quaker Neck, and Rock Hall. The problem with this area is the land is made of many peninsulas and fingers out into the Chesapeake Bay and there aren't many bridges. So the whole day is basically spent driving down one of the 10-mile peninsulas, and then back up and down another peninsula. However, it had been a very long time since I visited that area, so there were enough geocaches to make it worth the trip just going down a few of the larger fingers of land. There is a lot of beautiful scenery by the bay and water features. Unfortunately, after the heavy rain late that day, there was quite a bit of flooding in Rock Hall. I noticed that the bay water was pretty much already up to the level of the road and some of the docks and platforms are in danger of getting washed away the next time there is a superstorm. When I saw that, I decided it would be a good idea to just detour around the flooded areas and leave.

( The caches... )

On Saturday, I'd planned to attend a geocaching event in Cheesequake State Park but I was late because of bad traffic delays around the Old Bridge area. So I decided to just go ahead and get to the other geocaches on my list for the area. I found most of the "BC Mania" series of geocaches. Each one is a bottle cap micro cache, hence the name. These caches themselves took hardly any time compared to the U-turns and traffic lights on the way from one to the next. However, I can recall a few of them that were placed in interesting ways. I also took a little detour to Cliffwood Beach to get away from the high traffic areas for a short while during the afternoon. Poricy Park was another place I visited on Saturday with good hiking trails. In that park, "The Most Fantabulous Person in Middletown" is an amusing cache that asks you to open a box to reveal the most fantabulous person in Middletown. It's actually a mirror. :)

On Sunday, I went to Lawrenceville to do a mascot gig with jbadger and Damian for the Lawrenceville Jubilee. It's a good event with a good crowd, although perhaps it wasn't as busy as in previous years because of drizzly/cloudy weather early in the afternoon. Unfortunately, people were a bit messy and dropped pies (among other things) on the pavement, making public fursuiting a bit hazardous. But by then, we were ready to stop and pack up anyway. I didn't take any pictures myself since I was in fursuit the whole time I was out but here are some photos and two videos from JBadger's phone.

( The caches... )

Saturday was a rainy day. I had already planned on heading to Maryland so I didn't change my plans but decided to do some of the easier geocaches and anything I left out on previous trips in the vicinity of Havre de Grace, Churchville, Bel Air, and Fountain Green. I'll save the bike trail geocaches near White Marsh for another time. There was still plenty to do. There were some puzzles that I solved since my last visit, so I went and found the final cache containers for those. I also hiked the trail behind Harford Community College despite the rain. This being a campus trail, there were some prank signs along the way. I also revisited the Bel Air neighborhood where someone called the police the last time and interrupted my search. Apparently, they had problems and/or were nervous about strangers. (Even the police officer thought that was ridiculous but I decided to skip the area that day.) This time, nothing happened and I was able to finish the "Crazy Bone" series. The "Atari 2600 Tribute" series that I did on Saturday is noteworthy. Each cache is a repurposed Atari cartridge.

Sunday was another rainy day. I headed out early in the morning for the Hi-4 mascot gig at CFF Great Strides in Point Pleasant Beach. I actually wasn't sure we were going to do this because the crowd was rather small due to the rain. However, Damian K and Rapid T Rabbit arrived a bit later and we went ahead with the gig. The husky fursuit got wet and a bit muddy around the legs but most of it is machine-washable so that's not a problem. We had a bit of fun, did the gig until around 1pm, and split up. For the rest of the afternoon, I found some simple geocaches around Manasquan, West Belmar, and Neptune. At times, it was raining too hard to carry electronics around outside so I used aerial photos and some good guesswork to find those caches. On the way home, I noticed that it wasn't raining in the Bordentown area so I stopped there for a while to pick up a few more geocaches and kill time before dinner.

( Field Puzzle Hacks )

( The caches... )

On Saturday, I returned to the Henry Hudson Trail in Monmouth County to finish the remainder of the animals series. This time, I started at the other end in Leonardo and did geocaches "Anaconda" thru "Chipmunk". On this part of the trail though, they weren't strictly in alphabetical order. I still had plenty of time after that, so I went around Atlantic Highlands, Keansburg, Middletown, and Keyport to do more geocaches in the area. I was amazed at how much money these beach towns have spent on their waterfronts. Keyport, in particular, had the most well-lit gazebo I've ever seen. However, that made finding the geocache easy, even at night. The boardwalk in Laurence Harbor was a pretty nice walk at night too.

Sunday was a rainy day, so I woke up late and had breakfast out at the local IHOP. (I had a coupon for a free Rooty Tooty.) My plan was to do just a few geocaches in the afternoon between rain showers. So I headed out to West Chester and Exton after breakfast. Most of the geocaches I did were pretty quick. The exception, "WO-10 - Station Hillside Hollow", required a climb up a steep hillside. I apparently saved the best one for last though. "Mon Sheree Arbor" was a rather tricky geocache. I actually saw it pretty early in my search but didn't think it was the cache. Still, something about the way it was sitting bothered me enough that I had to go back and take a closer look, and that's how I found the hidden tube. Sometimes, I've got to pay more attention to a hunch.

( 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... )

Hot day today. 90°F in the early afternoon. I went geocaching in Monmouth County. Then in the evening, I went to the Third Tuesday Beer and Burgers - 2009 Edition monthly geocaching event at Fuddruckers in New Brunswick.

The two most interesting locations of the day were Jim Gary's Sculptures - The Playground and Jim Gary's Sculptures - Roadside Diner-saur, where I saw dinosaur sculptures, such as this green Stegosaurus, from local sculptor Jim Gary.

( The caches... )

It was a hot day (over 90°F) that turned very windy towards the evening. After one cache stop in Secaucus, I went to Monmouth County. Shorebound traffic was very heavy this afternoon! It made NYC / Long Island traffic look tame in comparison. Good thing I only needed to go through a few miles of that before I switched to secondary roads.

In Monmouth County, I first went down towards Freehold and then switched to the other side of the Parkway to Oceanport. I noticed that a newcomer to the game started hiding ammo cans in municipal parks around Colts Neck, which is good because I was getting tired of looking for microcaches. I also noticed that quite a number of caches were completely exposed. My guess is the area experienced some strong winds within the last few weeks and those winds blew away the bark, leaves, etc, that were covering the cache.

Dinner was at a new Wawa store in Cliffwood Beach. I had a meatball shorti since there was a special on that item this week. That store also had significantly cheaper gas than back home, so I filled up there even though it was only 6 gallons.

( The caches... )

So what do I do after a day with 6 inches of snow? Go geocaching, of course! I chose to go south to the Monmouth County beach area though because I knew they only had 3 inches of snow there. Traffic reports on the radio were a tad scary because of all the accidents and spinouts, but by the time I got going, the temperature was already up to 34°F and the roads were fine. I still had to let the heat go for a few minutes to get the ice off the windshield though.

Most of geocaches I did today weren't affected by the snow. A number of them were up in trees or hidden above ground level in some fashion. A few more were so obvious that the pile of sticks just showed through the snow. And the rest had hints specific enough that I could find the caches with a minimum of poking at the snow. In spite of the shallow snow cover, I still got my feet wet. I think my shoes are leaky.

Had a chili on rice hot-to-go bowl at Wawa in Matawan. That really hit the spot after a day of walking around in the snow. That Wawa store wasn't doing so well this evening. Their gas pumps had shut down for reasons unknown. After that, I went to Woodbridge Center Mall to pay a bill at the Sprint store. Because of where I parked, I walked through Lord & Taylor to enter the mall. Would you believe that this department store is now pricing shirts at $98? That's for just one dress shirt! Insane! In comparison, the handheld GPS receiver I'm using costs only about two Lord & Taylor shirts. Try navigating to a geocache using two shirts. Can't be done! :)

( The caches... )