Tap That Cache- June 24, 2006

Yep, we're back with another week of caching. I'm sure some of you have probably begun to question our sanity, coming back each week after barely surviving mountains, mudsinks, and Frodo (the bastard). But we've never really been a bright lot so on we press. Hopefully it at least gets you a couple of chuckles along the way.

This week we're back to what seems to be settling in as our usual crew. Me (Gryphon), Ashlynne, Tserof, Mad Mike, and Fish. Today we decide to hit some caches in the Marshall County area as well as show Mad Mike the location of the Zen Bassmasters cache since he wasn't with us last week when we placed it.

Our musical accompaniment for the day is Sevendust's "Southside Doublewide Acoustic Live" cd that I just downloaded off E-music. Great stuff.

The first cache we headed to was "Welcome to Bethlehem", which is on the way to Chapel Hill. It was listed as a difficulty 3, terrain 1.5 so we were expecting a bit of a challenge. The coordinates led us right to an old cemetary. Yay! The Zen Bassmasters love cemetary caches. I don't know if that means we're morbid, satanic, or just history lovers. I guess it's all the same thing to the right group of people.

We walked into the cemetary and looked around a bit. It was a pretty old cemetary with a lot of gravestones from the early 20th century. Heading back to the cache we ran across a couple of gravestones together that were tiny little stones for a couple of stillborn babies. They were dated in the 1920's. It was a tough time and that was definitely a sobering reminder of it. If you have a kid, go give him a hug and be thankful that modern medicine has advanced.

Anyway, the cache was just where we thought it should be. We've come to expect that from the originator, Scoot the Frog who, along with partner Monkeybrad, has become our favorite cacher. That said, we're now wondering about the difficulty 3 since we found it right off. Maybe we're just getting better. In the cache we found a fishing bobber, the perfect prize for a Zen Bassmaster and now destined for our cache, Wabbit Season.

The second cache of the day is called "Chapel Hill City Park." Having grown up in Unionville, which is right down the road from Chapel Hill, I wasn't aware Chapel Hill had a park. It's mostly farm land. What the hell do they need a park for?

The coordinates led us right into the middle of downtown Chapel Hill (as opposed to "uptown Chapel Hill", which is on the other side of the red light). That can't be right. The title says it's a park but the coordinates sent us right to a building with another building beside it. We re-check the coordinates. Yep. It's supposed to be right here. We drive a circle around the buildings, thinking maybe the park entrance is behind it. Nope. Just an alley. We drive back around to the front, thinking maybe this place used to be a park and we'd find something marking it. As we drove back around, Fish spotted a sign that he thought said "park" on it. Ah-ha! we thought. Must have been a park before this area grew up and the cache is near a historical marker. We parked uptown and took the 30 ft walk to downtown to investigate the sign. We walk up and find... a park. Of sorts. The Chapel Hill City Park consists of a paved area about the size of a cubicle, one tree, and two picnic tables. We found the cache in short order (easy to do when you're searching an area roughly the size of my bathroom) and discovered it had no log. Who the hell steals the log out of a cache? Weird. We added some paper for a new log and moved on, commenting on Chapel Hill's "Park". Of course, those two picnic tables could hold about half the city of Chapel Hill, so maybe it's appropriately sized. "I wonder if they book it for weddings?" Mad Mike asked. "They could.", I interjected. "With Chapel Hill weddings the whole bride's family/groom's family kind of overlap so it cuts down on the people to invite." I know. Not nice. But growing up in Unionville, it was the one place that even we could look down on...

Next stop was Henry Horton State Park for a duo of caches on one of the walking trails. The first was called Dendrology 101. Tserof read the clue, which was "Behind the Quercus Coccinea". Hilarity ensued. Jokes galore abounded about what sounded for all the world like Latin Porn. We kept having Tserof, whose sexuality we question daily for reasons I'll get into later, read the clue and giggled like a bunch of little boys who just discovered their dad's Playboy. All except Ashlynne, who has apparently matured past puberty and didn't see the true humour in "Quercus Coccinea".

Once the giggles subsided, we dispatched Tserof to go look up Quercus Coccinea on his cell phone's net access. Turns out it's a Red Oak tree. Go figure. I liked the other things we speculated it was better. Anyway, Tserof was impressed that he got to look up something on his phone (we're geeks remember) so we didn't have the heart to tell him that we'd already found a plaque that told us just that. We poked around for a bit and found the cache, a micro. I'm not huge on micros but it was cool spot so it's all good.

Next up was High Point of the Trail, which was a bit of a hike down the trail. We enjoyed the hike and saw some nice natural formations to comment on, including a HUGE flat rock that was big enough that we thought it was a parking area from a distance. We walked to the coordinates and cast about for the cache. No luck. Just then Fish noticed something that didn't look quite right. He investigated and, sure enough, there was the cache. I'm being intentionally vague with that description because it was undoubtedly the coolest hide we've seen yet and I don't want to spoil it for anyone. Congratulations JoGPS. We plan to steal your idea for a future hide. We signed the log and took a prism. We then discovered that we didn't have anything to leave. Fish took off his backpack and produced a letter H from inside. "The son gives me stuff to take to work with me sometimes" he said as we all stared.

By this time, Tserof had somehow decided that his new favorite word was Dendrology and was yammering constantly about his expertise with plants. We took to calling him Dr. Dendrology because of it (when we weren't calling him jackass). All the way back to the car, Tserof became the Bubba Gump of trees. Popcorn trees, fried trees, boiled trees, broiled trees, you can sautee it, deep fry it, etc. Finally Fish had apparently had enough because from ahead of us on the trail we hear Tserof yell "Ow! Fish, stop tapping my ass!"

Hilarity ensued. I mean hilarity. If you think the Quercus Coccinea brought out the snickering children in us, it was nothing compared to Tserof accusing Fish of "tapping his ass."

As I mentioned before, we openly question Tserof's sexuality often. This comes from his penchant for playing female characters in roleplaying games. I don't just mean playing a character who happens to be female. I mean PLAYING females. Dressing up in pretty clothes, flirting with guys, he even played a stripper in Star Wars Galaxies. Honestly, he's scary sometimes.

Anyway, much hilarity came from discussion of Fish tapping Tserof's ass, at least until we had to do an emergency intervention to keep Mad Mike from poking a hole in his brain by ramming the sharpened end of a stick into his ears. Apparently the mental images of Tserof's ample ass being tapped was just a little too much for him to handle.

At this point I should tell you that our little group has become adept at emergency mental image diversion. This is due to Tserof's habit of telling anyone who will listen, in excruciating detail, about his sexual exploits when drunk. Did I mention excruciating? You have no idea...

So after helping Mad Mike by helping him divert to "nice" mental images such as Jessica Alba, we moved on down the trail and back to the car.

The next cache was called "Forgotten One" and was another easy one. Little cache in a cemetary. Did I mention we like cemetary finds? We like cemetary finds. Nothing really to report on this one as it was a quick park and grab. Just suffice it to say that the jokes about Tserof's tapped ass continued throughout the grab.

Next up was "Cheap Cheap Cheap" which was supposed to be hidden near a business that apparently used that slogan in the past. The coordinates led us right to the courthouse square, about 100 yards from a place I used to work. While the man who runs the business is indeed "Cheap cheap cheap", the clue said nothing about "incompetent" or "ancient" so I was pretty sure that wasn't it. We poked around the courthouse for a bit, saw the war dead memorial, and found nothing. Just then Fish re-checks the coordinates and finds he's off. Way way off. Like half a mile off. I don't know what he was tracking, as there was no cache here, but he was. I think he just wanted to make me get near my old workplace and bring up bad memories. We all got back into the car and sure enough, it led us right to it. Once I saw the sign, a memory of my childhood sprung up and I knew it was right. I can remember the owner of the store on my television as a child screaming "CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP!" during his commercials. We found the cache easily and discovered a nice surprise. A travel bug! Not just a travel bug, but a fishing themed travel bug! How cool is that for the Zen Bassmasters? We took it, to move it over to our cache.

Our final cache is Berlin Spring. We drive out near Lewisburg's airport and find a neat little picnic area with a cave. Very cool spot. Even cooler still was that we found a plaque near a large flat rock that said all three of Tennessee's presidents, Jackson, Johnson, and Polk, had used this rock to make speeches. We're suckers for history and this was it. Fish stood on the rock and made a speech. We all agreed that we hated his political stance and promised to vote against him.

The cache was listed as a terrain 3 and it lived up to it. We walked up a hill, got eaten alive by thorn bushes, and became a walking buffet for the entire area's ticks, but we found the cache without anyone getting hurt, a first for our group.

We took pictures around the area and agreed that this was the coolest site today. Beautiful area.

It was getting late at this point and had been raining off and on all day so we decided if we were going to get a good picture for the travel bug (it requested pictures of cachers fishing) we needed to get back. We headed back to Fish's house to get a pole and head on over to our cache.

We'd had a complaint from one guy on geocaching.com that the cache was too hard to find and covered by poison ivy so we sent Mad Mike, who didn't know the location. He cast about for a while and eventually found the cache. It's kind of a difficult step to get to it so we sent Mike in to see if he could get to it, figuring if a 400lb guy could get it, it couldn't be too hard. He got it out but had a difficult time and suggested we move the cache to a 3. Done.

We placed the toys from today and the travel bug in our cache and went to drop Fish off, feeling quite accomplished at batting .1000 today (not to mention wet from the rain.)

All in all, a good day. I'll go back to the Berlin Spring site again just for the area so discovering that was worth the entire day. No injuries, no getting lost, no mountains. Probably a boring read but a nice day. If you like juvenile sexual innuendo or historical sites, today was your day. Otherwise, maybe next time. Stay tuned.