Monday, November 28, 2011

Geocaching Yanksgiving: - An Introduction

The events of this post happened between 12:00AM and 11:59PM on November 23, 2011.  

A series of events have conspired to send me and my family on another geocaching road trip.

Event The First:  A while ago I convinced the wife (really it didn't take long) that we should attempt to do the Delorme Challenge for North Carolina.  It involves finding a cache in all 77 pages of the Delorme North Carolina Road Atlas.  We have all of the western half of the state, but only have a few of the eastern pages.

Event The Second: Americans celebrate Thanksgiving at the end of November.  We are Canadians who live in North Carolina, but we still hold onto some Canadian traditions, one of which being we celebrate our Thanksgiving in October.  So when the end of November rolls around we essentially get 2 days free vacation to celebrate a  holiday I refer to as Yanksgiving.

So putting the math together, and adding an additional vacation day to the mix, we decided to celebrate Yanksgiving with a 5 day road trip to the eastern half of North Carolina to fill out some more Delorme Pages.



We spend today driving across the southern half of the state to the coast, picking up 6 pages, and ending up spending the night in Morehead City NC.

Some highlights of the day:
    Action shot
  • I found 9 caches today, including one of each of the traditional sizes: nano, micro, small, medium, large, jumbo.
  • I found all the traditional hides (guard rail, fire hydrant, in prickly bush, behind sign) except LPC.
  • Two of the containers were suspended in the air. I've only seen this 5 times, so its odd to see two in one day.
  • Milestone Alert:  One of the ammo-cans-suspended-in-the-air caches was my 900th find.
  • One of the caches was at a winery.  After singing the log we went in and got 6 bottles of wine for the pregnant lady...

    (What?!?!?!)

    ... before you get all panicky about the dangers about alcohol and fetuses, relax.  The wine is non-alcoholic, and will be used over the holidays by said pregnant lady to enjoy without causing my unborn child to grow an extra arm in-utero.

We actually ended up in Morehead City several hours ahead of schedule, so we decided to do a round trip to Cedar Island and grab the cache for that Delorme page.  This page is tricky as there is only one cache on the mainland, and it is completely out of the way.

Grabbing this cache adds several hours to our journey, so getting it out of the way now saves us significant time tomorrow.

Not to mention that it allows is to end our day with this amazing view:




Stay tunes for more adventures as a family of Canadians celebrate the latest holiday craze.

Oh, one more anecdote about the day.  When we packed Zeke up in the car this morning the first thing he said was, with an excited voice, "cache!".  I think I am raising my boy right :)