Caching our way to North Carolina
WE drove to North Carolina to meet up with friends to hike for a week on the Appalachian trail in the mountains of North Carolina. We did not cache on the trail but we cached on the way down and cached in a few towns in NC. I will add more info later about the hike ad the people and the mountains, but this first installment is simply some caching stuff.
*Most of the trip was on I95, I84 and I81. We had travelled that route a few times before so it limited the caches available. There were some newer caches at some rest areas so we tried quite a few of those
*At many Interstate exits across the USA there are J.O.E caches (Just Off the Exit). They are P & G on guard rails or at stores.
*At a JOE in Maine we were spotted by the cache owner and we had a nice chat. We passed a few TB’s to him.
*We have found caches in all the east coast states and have the souvenirs but we noticed that there is a souvenir for DC, so we planned a detour to the northern suburbs of Washington. It took 4 hours of bumper to bumper traffic, crawling traffic, construction delays, and all kinds of other stuff us rural people are not accustomed to, but we finally got to add our name to the log sheet. We wanted to be sure the cache was in DC so we asked a mailman who confirmed that one side of the street was Maryland and the other side was DC.
*On our detour to DC we stopped at a rest area for a cache and noticed a strange coincidence. The last person to sign the cache was an OHIO cacher whose TB we had picked up in OHIO last month and still had with us.
*We stopped at a rest area in NC and when we got back to our vehicle, there was someone taking photos of our GEOCACH license plate and our vehicle bug. It was a Florida cacher.
*During part of our time in NC, we stayed at a hiker lodge in the mountains. The owner will be receiving the visit from a group of destitute big-city children in the future and has been contemplating placing caches (likely fake ones) in the nearby woods and wanted info about gps, caches, etc. We discussed and I will be contacting him in the future.
*on I40 we stopped for a cache at a rest area. It was a much needed break. That portion of the Interstate goes though mountain territory. We were on a winding road next to transport trucks going around mountains, around sharp curves and into tunnels through the mountains. Very unnerving.
MORE LATER