My son, Mike had some work to do in Allen, TX, so we planned some time in for geocaching. We picked up a couple of P & Gs on the trip there, and after we checked into the hotel, we loaded up some nearby caches and headed out. Since this town was named after a famous Orlando geocacher who goes by the name of The Lanes, we knew we were in for some treats!The first place we went was to some abandoned train tracks behind the hotel, and then off on a path to find the oldest cache in the area. We looked all over the area, and could not find the cache, but we heard water so we headed out to see what was there. We discovered this old dam, and of course, we took the time for this photograph. We crossed over the dam, and started looking for a cache on the other side of the river, and we DNFed this cache , as well. WOW! What a start to north Texas geocaching...
We went after another cache near the hotel, which turned out to be a really fun find. It was off the main road, into some thick brush. We looked the area over, and found a easier way into the area, and once inside the brush, I spotted the cache.
Mike could hear me laughing and he headed in, too. Here is what we found. A Curious George monkey cache. Cute, Isn't it? It got rave reviews on a Facebook post. I had to get a shot with Mike and George. We found another 12 caches in the area that day, but they were mostly the P&G variety, and nothing out of the ordinary.
Mike could hear me laughing and he headed in, too. Here is what we found. A Curious George monkey cache. Cute, Isn't it? It got rave reviews on a Facebook post. I had to get a shot with Mike and George. We found another 12 caches in the area that day, but they were mostly the P&G variety, and nothing out of the ordinary. I changed the coordinates for my FTF alerts in hopes of grabbing another Texas FTF. It would be a few days before I had a chance to do any caching. We were finished on Friday, and were set to head back to Florida on Saturday morning. I was beat and went to bed early Friday evening, I guess around 10:30, and the next morning, I check the phone, and there were seven new caches published at 10:45 pm! Crap... as I read over the cache pages and saw that the six caches on a nearby trail had been found by six or seven local FTF hounds, but the one nearest to the hotel, only 6 tenths of a miles away, had no find logs. Hmmm, maybe it was not found last night, and I look out the window and it is pouring, but I can see the sky clearing in the distance. I tried to get Mike to go with me, after all, I may need help finding a 3.5 difficulty, but he wants no part of the cache because he doesn't want to get muddy for our trip home. I download the cache to the GPS, and grab a cup of coffee and head to GZ, which the satellite shows to be off the abandoned railroad tracks, where we had cached a few days ago, only at the other end.
I am not going to mention the name of the cache or post any pictures, but it was definitely a hide I have never seen before. However, the way I found it is pretty funny. I looked everywhere in the area, for over thirty minutes and I could not find the cache. I had some ideas from the name of the cache, but I was drawing blanks. I started playing around with the railroad track nails, because a local Orlando cacher, Stray Goose had told me about an idea he had for hiding a cache, and I thought an abandoned railroad track might be the perfect place to get the parts he needed. I noticed that the track nails were very easy to pull out, so I grabbed the one nail on the inside of the tracks and the one on the outside of the tracks, which left a steel repair plate loose, which I tried to remove. When I moved the steel plate, I spotted the cache hidden below the plate. Talk about lucky! I was so excited, but sure that no one had found this tough cache yet. I opened the log sheet, and to my surprise, three people had already signed it! The FTF was at 11:45 last night. It turned out that this was a replacement cache, and the other finders had already found the previous cache that was hidden there. Oh well, FTF was not to be this trip, but I will be back there for more caching, and another try for a FTF. The Dallas area is filled with geocachers and geocaches, and is very much like our area here in Florida.
On the way home we tried to grab a cache whenever we stopped, which was not very often. I cannot wait to get back to the Dallas area for geocaching, they have some really cool hides and spots to see.
