My father is working on a new cache that will eventually be located in a field in his neighborhood. Before we went caching we wanted to scout some specific potential caching spots and get some averaged coordinates with the Garmin.
Now for the "back in my day!" old man commentary - I grew up in this neighborhood and this particular field used to be more or less open with a few clumps of trees. You could see all the way from one end to another easily, and we even used to launch model rockets and fly kites over there as it was ideal for that kind of stuff. One time, when I was probably about 12 years old, a hot air balloon had gone off course and landed there since it was so open.
That's all changed. The whole field is overgrown with trees, albeit small ones, and you can't see very far even in the winter. It's actually a great potential caching area as there are paths throughout the mini-woods, and it's like a mini-adventure in the suburbs.
It was a balmy afternoon in the low 30s when we got there. Jack was bundled up like Randy from A Christmas Story and I even had my hat on (which is rare). The whole area was swampy and flooded, and the paths leading to where we wanted to scout GZ were flooded out, so we spent a lot of time bushwhacking. After about 25 minutes of wandering swampy trails and trying to keep Jack from getting too muddy we reached the planned GZ, only to find this:
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| Somebody has built a log cabin fort. |
The ultimate log cabin drinking fort is located in a field in a heavily built up suburban development. It kind of reminded us of something that would have been in the Blair Witch Project, except that it was less than 300 feet in any direction to get back to civilization.
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| Jack exploring. That's an industrial spool used as a table. |
While things were a bit run down, it was obvious that someone or multiple someones have spent a lot of time building it.
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| Car seat chair, and you can see the porch overhang on the right. |
The logs looked like they were harvested right from this very field. We found a nice little pile of logs nearby that looked like a potential addition. With a tarp over the roof this would be quite the spot.
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| That's me, and I'm 6'8" tall, so this was pretty big. |
There was a good amount of debris in the area, but that may be because it's the middle of winter and nobody's been here for a while. While I'm curious to check this out again in the summer sometime (I marked the coordinates), it does put a damper on hiding a cache in the vicinity as it will probably see too much non-cacher activity.
By this time, Jack was getting cold and irritable about all of the thorns in the underbrush. I've talked about caching with a kid before, but honestly with the 30 something degree weather, swampy ground, and potential scratches, he held up remarkably well.
We decided to pick up a few caches as we were on a somewhat tight schedule. We drove a few minutes to pick up A pine highd and Mushy Squishy, both of which had been found by my dad in the past. Jack had actually helped my parents find A pine highd back in May so I knew what to expect, but wow, that was a challenge to pick up. Mushy Squishy was in the same park and was much easier to grab. I was also able to trade trinkets for a light up yo-yo, so Jack was thrilled.
After these two, we went down the road a bit to check out the member's only 1743 potter's field, which is another one that my dad had picked up in the past. I'm all about history, so this was a fascinating place to visit, even though there really isn't all that much to see. Potter's Fields were where poor or unknown people were buried in unmarked graves.
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| Sign post. |
What was most fascinating to me is that this is only like a 5 minute drive from where I grew up, but I had no idea this was here. I wasn't that interested in history back then, either, so that's part of it.
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| Jack and my dad. |
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| The Boy Scouts maintain this area. |
There is a marker stone explaining a bit of the history.
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| From what I've seen, this was a local John Penn. There was a descendant of William Penn named John, but it looks like he spent all of his time in PA. I may be wrong, though. |
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| Not a very big field. |
As I mentioned, my dad had picked this cache up before. I used the Garmin and checked the hints but couldn't find it. He verified that it was no longer there, so I just planned on submitting a Needs Maintenance log. The recent logs on my Garmin showed some DNFs, so I assumed that it was gone. When I checked the cache out on the computer it turns out that the cache owner did some maintenance on the cache on Friday, and wouldn't you know that I updated my GPS on Thursday and was looking at the old coordinates?
My father caches with an iPhone, but because he saw that it wasn't where it had been, and because I saw the DNFs, we didn't bother to check it and ended up skipping this cache. Oh well, it's only a few minutes from my parents' house, so I'll pick it up one of the next times we visit.
Jack was starting to complain about the cold again by this point, and who could blame him? It was cold and windy, so he waited in the car when we picked up the nearby 7th Hole in Laurel Acres Park, which is a park that will eventually end up in my "Great Local Parks" post once I pick up a few more caches there and have a little more time to explore. As it was, we were all getting cold and ended up heading home to warm up.
All in all this was a good day. It's been great this week to get out caching again, and I really can't wait for the onset of warmer weather so I can really get out and about again without fear of frostbite.
Caches in this post:
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