This was an epic week of geocaching, and a not-at-all big of running.
The day after the New South Half Marathon, I was still super-tired and super-unmotivated to get out at all. Recovering, I suppose.
I didn't exercise again until Thursday, when I did a 55 min strength session at 5am. Strength sessions are great for loosening my body back up, and getting it ready for safe running. Since the race had been so hard, this did its magic, as usual.
COWPENS GEOTRAIL
<<< Warning- spoilers! >>>
That night, I had to do something for work after 10pm but before 5am, and I wanted to be at the office for that, so I had some time to kill in the evening. I decided to go for the Cowpens Geotrail. A geotrail is a series of geocaches put out by a group, with a certain theme, and sometimes, a prize (like a geocoin). To prove that you've visited, you sign your logs, as usual, but they also have a code or stamp or sticker at each geocache, which you record in a printable "passport", which you turn in at the end. The summer days mean more daylight, so I figured I would get in as much as I could this day, and finish another day.
Cowpens is a city at a historic site - the site of Battle of Cowpens from the Revolutionary War, which was a turning point when the Patriots had a surprise victory over the Red Coats. The geotrail took me to various parts of the town, so it was a nice tour plus geocaching.
(As usual, geocaching takes you to surprising places that you never knew about, whether it's in your home town, or in a city that you're visiting, with a place that guide books wouldn't necessarily show. There are places of significance all around. You learn cool things about these places through the cache descriptions on the app or geocaching website, like at this cool mural.)
(One fun cache was this "Window Shopping" one, where you found clues to obtain various pieces of coordinates, based on pictures on the cache page. I made 2 mistakes during the hunt, getting wrong numbers twice. Thanks to Google maps satellite view, I could tell that I had made some kind of mistake, and re-checked my work a couple of times to figure out where I went wrong.)
(Caches that are not straightforward grabs are fun, too.)
(Drive-through caching)
(Surprise in a surprise in a surprise.)
To finish the Cowpens geo-trail, you had to find 12/16 of the caches. I was able to finish the last couple a little after the sun set - not bad for an after-work evening!
While I was caching here, I found some geocaching trading cards from an event from last year. Yes, geocaching trading cards. There's a big event with more than 1,000 attendees in Georgia, and last year, participants got to create their personal trading card with their geocaching stats. Some of these cards were put out by organizations, and one of them was for another geo-trail in Spartanburg county... an adventure for another day!
FTF #2
There are so many elements of geocaching that are fun:
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Trackables (items that you or others own, with serial#s, whose path from cache-to-cache around the world you can track, and help along various owner-designated missions)
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Signature Items (items that you make or have companies make, that you can trade/leave for others, with or without your geocaching handle... a personal way to interact with fellow cachers, and a way to be artsy)
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SWAG (trading small items/toys/mementos, in the caches)
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The "hunt" aspect (like an Easter egg hunt for people of all ages)
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Gadget Caches (figure out how to open up a cache, which has some kind of clever locking mechanism that may require you to do a series of things to the container, or use some kind of tool-of-the-trade)
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Earth Caches for nature lovers who want to learn about geological features,
Puzzle Caches for people who like to solve some kind of puzzle to figure out coordinates, it goes on and on...
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FTF is a contest within a game, where people race to have the honors of being the first-to-find a cache after it's initially published. Premium members who pay $10/month have an advantage of being able to set up queries and alerts when new caches around them are published. I'm a basic free member, so my only hope of finding these is randomly scrolling through the pages of caches around me, seeing if I can happen to come across a newly published cache.
On Friday evening, I was looking, and I saw one! It was a puzzle cache, published the day before. The puzzle caches can sometimes be super enigmatic, like crazy that they could contain any type of clue, but it was worth a shot. To up the ante, the cache owner had added a prize in the cache, for whoever found it... a trackable FTF item.
The cache had a picture of a house, with a sign in front of it with some coded words. Once you decoded this, you had three odd words. I had to figure out what to do with those three random words, to turn them into coordinates. I puzzled and puzzled, so eager to figure it out... then, I did!
I threw on some random clothes, not caring that they didn't match, and went out to the cache location. My heart was pounding so hard as I drove. I got there and there it was! With the prize! So excited. I couldn't stop smiling.
Hurray!
After this, I got in a run - my only for the week. It was 4.0 in 32:34, 8:09 average, at 2 degrees of incline. My upper tummy was in a ton of pain during this run, for some odd reason. It wasn't immediately after I ate. Not sure what it was, but it made me feel like I was sweating from bearing the pain, more than I was from the run itself, and I was groaning with each step. I counted down the last mile in 0.01 mi increments. Oh well, best not to over-do running when my body was still recovering from last weekend's half, anyway.
PACOLET GEOTRAIL
I decided to go for the Pacolet Geotrail that I had found out about through the Going Caching trading cards, the next weekend.
It was a ways away, in a small town nestled by a river. This is the best Geotrail I've done, in the three that I've done. It was great because each cache in this series was stellar, with each offering something unique.
(Fun surprises around the town)
(Cute caches)
(Puzzle cache)
(Ruins - always cool, like Indiana Jones)
(Pretty nature stroll with flowers, bamboo forests, and a beaver!)
(A gadget-y cache involving a beautiful and surprising waterfall)
(A cache hidden in a stone wall)
(An incredibly fun gadget cache, unlike anything I've seen before)
It was an awesome day, exploring a beautiful and nice town.
GEOWOODSTOCK 14ER-
The fourth reason this week was epic was that I signed up for what may be the premier geocaching event of the year, Geowoodstock. It's the 14th edition, and they were clever and decided to host it in Denver, Colorado, home of the 14er mountains. I had been wanting to re-visit the 14ers, this time, with my dad, so it was a perfect opportunity to do that, while attending the event and feeding my hunger for geocaching. Can't wait!
