the clueless american

For the last 2 months I've been wanting to head to the top of Kennesaw Mountain while we lived only 2 miles from it, and today we finally did. I've been on a Geocaching kick lately, and this gave us a chance to see the mountain and log off another find.

When we stepped out of the door it was pretty chilly at our apartment, so we felt confident in wearing jeans and long-sleeve shirts. e even brought along a jacket. Naturally by the time we got to the mountain the sun had come out and it started getting hot, but that comes in to play a little later.

We arrived to find the road to the top open despite the big "CLOSED" sign at the bottom. With e more than 2/3 of the way through her pregnancy, she was a lot happier to drive than walk up. We got to the top and found the first 3 parts of the cache which were signs that described the Civil War Battle of Kennesaw. The hunt required us to write down numbers from each sign to form the coordinates for the final monument. After finding the 3rd one, we entered the new coords into the GPSr. It said the final place was a mere 1/2 mile away, so off we walked. As we passed the car, we decided it was only a "little way" down the trail, and e confirmed that she'd rather walk with me than wait while I hiked the trail.

15 minutes later we found ourselves back at the Visitor's Center with the final stop still .1 mile away. While e made a pit stop I tried to walk off the final 1/10th of a mile. Unfortunately my GPSr hiccuped and led me in a circle back to the Visitor's Center. Thinking the final stop must be inside, we walked in and wound up going through the museum. It was interesting but did not have the final monument we were seeking. So...I went back outside, re-calibrated the GPSr, and found the thing, less then 100 feet away from where I'd been before getting turned around.

After taking the picture below at the monument, we started the long trek back up. In my own defense I must point out that I offered to let e wait at the bottom while I ran up to get the Jeep, but she insisted on coming with me. Needless to say we got a lot of strange looks from people we'd seen on our way down wondering why the poor pregnant woman was struggling back UP the mountain. Didn't she know she was supposed to stay at the bottom after walking down? Apparently not! We took a leisurely 45-minute, 3-stop walk back up the mountain (1.0 mile and about 800 feet up).

All-in-all we had a lot of fun at the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, but it was a little different than I expected. Growing up in NJ I've often visited Valley Forge and Gettysburg which are now basically beautiful, open fields where the grass is always green and trimmed just so. In contrast, Kennesaw Mountain is left pretty much like it must have been during the Civil War, with the exception of the paved road that climbs it. There are fallen trees all over the place, and weeds growing a foot high near the long-silent Confederate cannon. I was initially disappointed, but when e pointed out its historical accuracy I was impressed.

Still, I had to rib e a little bit about the obvious Southern bias to the signs in the federally-funded park. In the North you pretty much get the facts: Union Army, 4,000 troops, Confederate Army, 3,000 troops, etc. Only in the South will you see "The Yankees had more troops but the valiant Confederate crusaders were defending their homeland and were able to stave off the enemy aggression." Of course that didn't happen at Kennesaw, because the South lost and Sherman went on to burn Atlanta, but that was about the tone of the markers :-) I also had to smirk a little at the big deal made about the "Earthenworks" (note important capital E) all over the place that were nothing more than dirt mounds piled up near the cannon. Granted, they were 140-year old dirt piles, but it's not like they were clay pots or pictures carved into rock. It was just dirt, now overgrown with weeds, but I respected it like the "Hallowed Land" it was made out to be.

Like I said, we had a great time, and we celebrated the morning's exercise by eating lunch at the Trough.

Here I am at the final monument--bad photo courtesy of my new low-res Geocaching camera :-)

I had to head up to Calhoun this morning to buy carpet for our new house. I decided to do some geocaching while I was up there since we didn't get to do it the last time we were in the area.

My first stop was at a cache called Sonoraville Boys, so named because it was in the old Boy Scout Cabin seen below. There's also a close-up of the cornerstone plaque. Notice how they spelled it "Senora" back in 1942 but it's Sonoraville now.

Like many caches, this was a lot easier than I made it. I was actually at the right spot a full 10 minutes before I actually found the thing. I knew it had to be there, so I did what I always do when I'm having trouble: I stopped looking at anything but the coordinates. Once I got them at the exact spot I looked around and said "It has to be there," and it was! The cache was stuffed with goodies, so much that I had a hard time closing the ammo can at the end.

After Sonoraville, I headed up the interstate a bit to another cache. This one was near the New Echota Cemetery, a burial site from the former capital of the Cherokee Nation. It has only a few gravesites but was still very interesting. The center of the small cemetery is the burial site of Col. Pathkiller, called the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Naturally when I put his name into Google I found that he's also supposedly buried in Alabama, and neither cemetery has supporting proof that Pathkiller was really buried there. In any event, it's a nice monument to a man I never knew existed. Type his name into Google if you want to learn more.

From New Echota I went back to Calhoun where I had a very good cheeseburger at Checker's. I've been seeing their commercials a lot on TV, and they did their job of making me want to eat there :-)

After lunch I drove into downtown Calhoun for the last find of the day, a micro cache attached to the bottom of a railcar. After finding this one I meandered back through Calhoun, stopping at Dollar General and Family Dollar to re-stock my "swag" bag.

On the way home I made my only unsuccessful stop of the day. There is a micro located at a Quik Trip right off of I-75, but there were so many people around that I didn't look as thoroughly as I would have under other circumstances. I hate to not find a cache when I know that I'm right there, but sometimes that's the way it works.

Now that I'm home I need to log all of my finds and plan a possible caching trip for tomorrow. We'll see how that works out.

After a 14-month hiatus, I did some geocaching again yesterday and today. Before leaving Georgia I downloaded the 50 caches closest to Lackand and transferred them to my GPSr and my Palm Pilot. Overpacking notwithstanding, I had enough room to bring along a little swag as well.

Saturday was a pretty dreary day, but as I pulled out on the road I'm sure the announcer said it would be a sunny afternoon. The sun never came, but it was still a good day.

The first cache was very close to the base at a 9/11 memorial put together by a church. If the picture comes out I'll upload it once I get home. It was a nice enough memorial with an easy-to-find cache right behind it. The disappointing thing was that the people who built the memorial just threw their trash right behind it! There was half a plaque where they'd either mis-spelled the name or maybe the sponsor backed out at the last minute; it was easy to see that it was the same style and material as the memorial. They must have thought that people would walk behind the memorial because there's a walk with newly-planted trees there.

Anyway, from there I moved on to another cache near the closed-down Levi factory. It was easy enough to find but required some walking through the dirt which was rapidly becoming mud. I was glad to be doing it in the daytime as there appeared to be some sort of homeless camp nearby.

My only DNF (did not find) of the day came when I went looking for a cache hidden right by an on-ramp. It took me 3 times to realize that there was a parking lot just before the on-ramp, and each of those times I had to drive a mile or two before there was a turn-around. The second time I chose a different exit which of course did not have a return to the highway. I had to drive another few miles before finding my way back. By the time I was finally in the parking lot and able to look around, it had started to rain. I got tired of walking around poking through all the trash there so I gave up on it.

I did 3 more caches after that, giving me a 5 for 6 record for the day. Not too shabby for my return to caching. The most time-consuming and challenging part was finding the right roads to take me where the GPSr was pointing.

Today was a much nicer day, but I didn't get started until late because I had to make my last shopping trip before the surgery. By the time I got ready to cache it was already nearing 1, so I grabbed some lunch and then got moving. I found 3 of 4 caches, with the only DNF being one where I knew I was in the correct spot but couldn't find the cache. The owner wound up de-activating it tonight because I was the 2nd DNF this week, but sometimes that happens where 2 can't find it and the next one does. After my last cache, the next 3 were in a place where the owners recommended 4WD and lots of off-road driving. I live by the TDY motto "it's a rental," but I didn't feel like getting stuck in my Neon so I headed back. 8 caches in 2 days--not too bad! I have to go to at least one cache in Georgia because I picked up a travel bug that needs to go there. I hope to take MJ as he grows up.