Team Markwell's GPS Adventures
Non omnes vagi perditi sunt
In chronological order

Back Home

June 2001

While down in Tennessee for my Father-In-Law's retirement party, I decided to take advantage of my wife and get her out for a cache experience. Up until now, she had only been on Dr Spyro's Challenge and stayed behind on the paved path. Three and a half hours later and after much bouldering, my wife thought I was insane for dragging my 5 year old on trips like this. I had to keep reassuring her that this was NOT the 2½ terrain rating that it currently had on the system. After a few conversations with cachers, the owner did upgrade this terrain considerably. Please note that while my footwear icon shoes mountain boots, we only had sneakers. Bad mistake!

My Third Cache! Hard as Pi by Markwell N 41° 36.622 W 088° 10.214 Difficulty: Terrain: Date Placed: 6/16/2001

OK - no more Mr. Nice Guy. After my fiasco with Soccer Mom's Revenge, I decided I needed to go all out on the difficulty. Caches don't have to necessarily be difficult to get to, as long as they're difficult to FIND. Think math - think college math. Each leg of the journey is in a difficult to reach (and see) spot, and each leg's clues get progressively harder ending up with trigonometry to answer the last questions. Still to date, my favorite cache placement.

We decided to reward our efforts of the previous week's placement with an all day cache-a-thon. We hit three caches on this particular Sunday, with the placement of our first Travelling Hitchhiker. Red Bridge was a nice little walk in the park with the boys and we found a great, albeit soggy, cache. Unfortunately, the box wasn't big enough for the hitchhikers.

I nice diversion for me and the wife. The youngest fell asleep in the car, and we took the 10 steps out of our car to find the Geocache, check it out and decide not to trade (nor put the hitchhiker in it).

What a cool cache: hiking in the woods, deer on the path, tall grass and the last 500 yards in a pine forest. Wow. Only bad part was when we walked through the tall grass, we picked up some ticks. We brushed quite a few off before getting into the car, but it completely freaked out my wife that we brought two home. The next morning, we were slowly rolling out of bed and she felt a mosquito on her leg. She brushed it off, and when it didn't come off, she picked it up. Next thing I hear is a blood-curdling scream of, "OH MY GOD! IT'S A TICK!" and she threw it to the other side of the room. Luckily, I found it and it's swiming witht the gators. I did find another on my jeans from the previous night. Guess we'll be better prepared again.

Having seen the great success of "Fly Radio Flyer Wagon" (now Fly... MARS ROVER) we rumaged through our various kiddie toys and decided to take a look for some hitchhikers. When we found a Scooby Doo and a Shaggy, we new we had the pair. They've had some troubles, but they're really cooking on the distance travelled. Very cool to track it - and this cache is Sherry's favorite.

Another wonderful outing - this time more prepared for bugs again. We tried a pair of caches only two miles apart (the other is "Flood Plain" below). This cache was a great find with a fabulous fallen tree near the entrance to the park. I must say that the tree was easily over 100 years old and left a root ball the size of a bus when it toppled over into the Des Plaines River. My son and I took a pretty direct route, which turned out to be a mistake, as we needlessly went off trail into a wooded swampy area. Still, it was a good hike and an easy cache.

With Trailside under our belt, we took the short trip across the railroad tracks via car to find the Flood Plain cache. Originally, we parked on the west side of the park, only to get about 500 feet from the cache - on the wrong side of the Des Plaines River (which, of course, all the maps show). So we drove to the east side of the park and headed through some trails. Finally, it seemed that we were closing in - but the path turned sharply to the north. My son and I delved down the embankment to see if there was a path in the actual flood plain. There was no path, and the weeds were about chest high to me, and over my son's head. After our tick experience the previous day, we decided to wait on this one. We will be back when the weeds aren't so tall.

I had been toying around with the idea of Geodashing for quite a while, and there was a spot near Morris. Since no one else had tried, I decided to be the first Geodasher. I left my house about 6:00 a.m. and booked it through every little back road I could think of to get to the far side of Morris. I drove almost completely around the dashpoint (a word I coined in this message, but I used it as two words), and finally decided to park on the west side. It was the middle of a cornfield, and I hopped (in my dress clothes) out of the car, set up the camera tripod and took a 360° shot of the area (see picture icon below). My GPS said I was 0.15 miles from the center point, so I figured I was there. It wasn't until the replies that I found out I had to be within 100 meters of Ground Zero to get credit. No points for dashing this month!

Back to May 2001
On To July 2001

Last Updated: Thursday, February 21, 2002 15:00 CST