State Park Geocaching Round Two: Old Friends, New Adventures

Well it’s been a couple months since we went geocaching and camping at Jonathan Dickinson State Park, but we had so much fun we planned a second trip. If you haven’t seen my posts from our first trip back in January, check them out here:

Geocamping 2010 Part One: Jonathan Dickinson State Park
Geocamping 2010 Part Two: Late Night Caching
Geocamping 2010 Part Three: Let There Be Light, And No Cloud Cover!

Old Friends, New Adventures

We had so much fun on our first trip that we went again 6 weeks later. It was awesome. It’s taken me too long to write this post (two weeks! ugh!) so I’m probably forgetting a lot but here goes.

This trip gained a bit of popularity from some of our friends, so we had the extra company of Bethany and John with us. It was fun to show some newbies the ropes. We were a bit worried starting out, because for the past 12 hours it had been raining HARD. REAL HARD. So hard that we had to bring ponchos. Yes, geocaching at night, in ponchos. Pathetic, I know.

So we got to camp and Adam brought some Meals Ready to Eat. They were weird but intriguing. I ate my beef ravioli straight out of the pouch, it was actually REALLY good! Bethany had a very strange chocolate shake and Donnie’s cheese sauce was a little bit stale, but hey – it was food and it was free!

We hit the trail on bikes this time. Last time we wasted a lot of time and energy walking from cache to cache. When each cache is at least 500 feet apart, walking can take quite a while. So this time, after sending a little time arguing deciding which area to hit first, we found our first few caches pretty quick. We learned that Bethany hates spiders, so you can tell which one was her favorite:

We tried to get to the next cache from several different ways, but all we could hear were crickets, bullfrogs and the occasional DEEP grunting sound. Yes. Aligators. Check out the first picture in the next set. The path led down into a dark area, but we decided not to go any further. I may be a huge nerd, but I’m not that stupid. We continued on finding several different kind of caches, many ammo cans and a few normal lock n lock boxes, nothing too out of the ordinary. It was fun to let John and Beth find some. Really the most fun of this trip was just being able to hang out with old friends. The caching was just a reason to be out there.

Of course, as soon as we really got into it, it stopped raining and now we had these heavy ponchos on for no reason, so we took them off and tried to regain any semblance of dignity that we could. But we we’re out in the middle of the night, tromping through the rain-soaked forest finding hidden containers filled with dollar store trinkets. You can understand how we all kinda looked at each other every now and then with the unspoken question: “What are we doing out here?” But it was tons of fun so we kept on looking for the next one.

After a few of the normal kind, we ran into a couple really cool caches. The first one was a puzzle cache that we could NOT figure out. But lucky for us, Donnie actually found the container next to a pile of rocks. We still don’t know why it was listed as a puzzle cache, cuz it was right where they said it would be:

After finding the puzzle cache, we headed off to the next one, but had trouble getting close to in on the trails. We were still half riding, half walking our bikes through some pretty rough terrain. Sometimes there were huge tree roots and other times the sand was too soft to ride over. So we were pretty tuckered. But we pushed on. And then over the hill we see this building. It looked like a haunted house. We were all too scared to go in, except for Donnie of course. I followed him in with the camera, being brave only because I knew he was already in there. Check out these creepy photos:

Of course once we got in, we realized the place was just an old water testing facility and we knew it was perfectly safe in there. We were a good mile within the state park, and pretty confident that any homeless people or troublemakers were nowhere around. But that didn’t calm my nerves completely. I was still pretty nervous in there. We also found a second building underground with a TON of abandoned junk. The photos don’t do it justice, but it seems like this was an abandoned storage room. It was easily 100 x 150 feet. We spent about 15 minutes exploring the building but we couldn’t go all the way through it; the whole place had a good 3 inches of water in it and I had somehow managed to keep my shoes dry so far that night and I wanted to keep them that way. Plus everybody else was waiting for us outside so we rejoined the group and kept going.

We spent the next hour or so finding several more small to medium sized containers: ammo cans and lock n locks. At this point it was nearing midnight and the MREs were wearing off. One of the last caches we found was aptly titled, “Time for a Sandwich” so we grabbed that one and headed back to camp for a late night Taco Bell run and some shut eye.

The next post will cover the rest of the night hanging out at the campsite and our daytime caches the next morning.

 

About the Author

Michael

I'm just a dorky guy who married an awesome girl and I get the privilege of waking up every day next to my best friend. As you can tell I like to geocache and love working with all kinds of technology and other fun stuff. I am a huge nerd, but hey, it pays the bills!

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