Monday’s Child-Free Adventure!

Wow, what a day!!!! I don’t have a lot of time to blog about it, but suffice it to say, today was AWESOME!!!!!  I was able to find 7 of the eight caches I searched for today, with the majority of them being in Madison, Georgia.  What a gorgeous, amazing place that was!!!! My Inner History Nerd was in HEAVEN!!!!! 🙂  All but one of the geocaches I hunted today had been placed by the Visitor’s Bureau (or whatever the official name is), designed to bring you into the neatest, most historical places of the area.  My first cache (the one not placed by the history folks) was at the cemetery pictured here and was probably the most meaningful to me.  The cache name was “RIP Confederate Soldier.”  Here lay many, many fallen Soldiers and some fallen Hospital Attendants… at least 51 of them UNKNOWN.  I found this cache rather quickly, and my immediate instinct was to log my find and move on to the next.   But… this place got its hooks into me very quickly.  The immense sense of history here was so profound… I couldn’t just cache & leave. I had to wander around and read the headstones, silently paying my respects.  A few in this area had names, but over & over it was just “Unknown CSA Soldier.” Some were from AL, TX, MS… most had no info beyond the “Unknown.”  I looked to see if there was anyone from the 34th GA Infantry, my Greatx3 Grandfather’s unit, but didn’t see anyone from there.  The longer I looked around, the more profoundly SAD I felt (sounds kinda flaky, I know… oh well).  I thought of all the wives, moms, brothers, sisters, children, friends… all those folks who were waiting on word of their loved one.  And waiting for them to come home after the War.  And waiting. And waiting…. and waiting…and….nothing.  Probably some heard second-or-third-hand the fate of their beloved.  In the days before DNA, email, TV, Cable News, or even electricity for that matter….an unknown was pretty much destined to stay unknown.  This made me sad! Anyone who’s known me longer than 2 minutes knows that POW, MIA, and Unknown break my heart, and they are never far from my thoughts.  I found myself saying (yeah, OK, this is cheesy, but it’s my blog, so deal with it, LOL) that though these men were unknown to US, there is no doubt that they are fully known to GOD, and I hope they landed in a place of peace when they fell.   I almost felt as if I was not alone there.  The feeling of heaviness and the immenseness of the history stayed with me in varying degrees for the rest of the day.

After the cemetery, I went to find a cache at an art museum.  It wasn’t open yet, but luckily, it didn’t have to be to find the cache! 😉 This was a quick & easy find (as all the Madison caches were on my list), so it wasn’t long before I was on to search for the cache called “Window Etchings.”  This was in the general vacinity of “Heritage Hall.”   Heritage Hall is a gorgeous old building – huge and elegant! It practically screams “GENTEEL SOUTHERN LIVING!!!” (except, of course, genteel Southern living would expressly prohibit screaming such a thing…but you get the idea.)   😀

I finished the remainder of my caches quickly…they were all really easy. Yay! 😉 Rather than rush home and on to the next area on my list, however, I went back to Heritage Hall and took the tour of the place (along with two other historic homes).  It was simply amazing.  If you are ever there… I highly recommend it! 😀 I love, love, LOVE history and old homes and such… like I said earlier, my Inner History Nerd was a happy camper indeed.  I then had lunch at a great, great restaurant, where I found a tribute to a local man who had sacrificed his life during WW2 in service to our country.  Awe-inspiring and humbling, indeed.  I almost didn’t eat at the restaurant I’d chosen, but fortunately, the fact that the building itself looked old & historic won me over.  Not only was the food great, I learned of  this local hero…another one to pay respects to.

After I was done with Madison (and I can almost guarantee that I WILL be back one day… loved it there!), I headed on over to Stone Mountain to find a cache or two.  As it turned out, I found only one of the two caches I was looking for.  The first one was pretty easy…not as easy as the Madison caches, of course, but it was a nice little walk in the woods.  I almost went home after that one… almost.  But then, I looked on my GPS and noticed that there was another geocache a mere *510* feet from my car.  Really??? That’s it? 510 feet? Oh, I just gotta!!!!

So…. off I went to find this elusive second cache that was sooooo close. Ha.  I was so excited about the “closeness” of this cache that I failed to remember the “terrain” rating on this one was a 4.  For the non-cachers out there… terrain is rated on a scale of 1 (easiest) to 5 (hardest). This was a 4.  I didn’t realize till I got close to where it may have been and I checked my GPS for hints… yes, I really DO have to climb up over those boulders, there… and there… and there, too! My GPS, which had behaved admirably all day, chose this particular cache to start being persnickety.  It jumped all around, taking me 180 feet here (usually, UP!), 85 feet there, 35 feet over yonder, no, wait, 200 feet thataway… and it was jumping around erratically like that without me even moving. It would say 85 feet one minute, then 180 the next second…before I’d even BLINKED, much less MOVED.  Needless to say, the terrain was NOT conducive to my usual “pick a spot and walk in circles around it till you find the cache” trick.  After close to 90 minutes of a really good workout, I was forced to raise the white flag and surrender due to time constraints.   😦

I went back DOWN the hill…then back UP the OTHER hill, back to my car.  I miraculously made it back to the kids’ daycare a full hour earlier than I’d anticipated. Yay!  The kids, of course, realizing that we still had PLENTY of daylight left (like, a whole HOUR!), begged me to please take them to find a geocache since they’d been stuck in school all day long!  Didn’t take much to twist my arm there, so we headed out to a local ball field to track down a nice, easy, kid-friendly geocache.  😉  Aside from a few thorns, we found it quickly. (And yes, *I* found it this time… NOT GeoKid1 for a change, LOL. I’m getting better….! haha).

We signed the logbook, swapped some stuff, then headed home.

(Yeah, GeoKid1 looks less than thrilled in this picture, haha… but it’s just bad photography timing, cuz just a split second before, she was talking and laughing.  I just clicked the camera at exactly the WRONG time, LOL. Oh well. 😉 )

And so ended my very long, very fun day.  It was the perfect “staycation” – all I had to pay for was some lunch and parking at Stone Mountain, and I had a heck of a lot of fun galavanting all over Georgia in search of History and Adventure.  Happily, I found both.

If you want to see all the pics I took today (there are MANY more than what is shown on the blog), just CLICK HERE. 🙂

 

Have a great week everyone!!!!