After my "mishap" in Point Washington I haven't been able to stop thinking about getting my coin back.
I WANT to find Mile Marker 7. I WANT to find my pirate coin. And I want to do this without injuring myself or getting lost in the woods.
There is no map of the roads and the trails in there but we know from my excursion that the trail crosses many roads, many times.
Which led the Island King to believe that we could drive close to the mile marker and then hike in a short distance to find it.
He studied topo maps and my breadcrumb trail and this afternoon off we went to Point Washington. Him sure we would have no trouble finding the marker and me a little nervous but knowing that between the Island King and the truck there wouldn't be a repeat of my last trip into the forest.
We're going in.
But this time I have a truck
And a husband with a map. A husband who is very good at navigating.
We're off to find Mile Marker 7 and my pirate coin.
We get to the first trail sign and after studying it for a while the Island King said he knew right where we needed to go.
We drove down a rode, pulled over and hiked a short way down a trail.
Where we found this.
Hmm.
He wants to go back to the sign.
But on the way we pass another sign.
He studies it for a while, declares the first sign to be wrong and that we now need to go East.
Which we did and that's where we found this.
Which caused some serious cussing and the declaration that BOTH signs had to be wrong.
We hiked back to the truck and although it was completely dark he was determined to find marker 7.
Obviously, somewhere, somehow, we'd missed marker 7.
Which is when he turned around, looked at me and said "You can stop beating yourself up about getting lost out here. I have a GPS, a map and navigational ability and I'm not sure where the damn marker is either."
It made me feel better to know that this was confusing, even to someone who knows how to navigate.
So we turned around and started back towards marker 8 as slow as we could go, knowing that somewhere out there in the woods had to be marker 7.
And then we saw it. Another marker we'd missed before.
We stopped and walked down the trail about 100 feet and there it was.
TaaaDaaa!!! It was like finding Jimmy Hoffa's body. We did it. IN THE DARK!!!!
Now all we had to do was find the cache the boys hid.
We had a flashlight and looked around a couple of trees and then we saw it.
Hidden at the base of a pine tree in a palmetto bush was the cache.
Surprisingly, everything inside was bone dry.
But...
The pirate coin? Turns out I didn't use the really cool, expensive coin for this travel bug, I used a trinket coin from the Billy Bowlegs parade.
The Island King looked at me and said "So all of this hullabaloo has been about a trinket from the parade? I thought we were after one of the good pirate coins."
Uh, well, now that I think about it I didn't use that coin.
But I did get my $5 travel bug tag back and can now send it out into the real geocache world on an adventure.
In the end, it didn't matter. We found mile marker 7, we found the cache and we retrieved my travel bug/pirate coin.
Mission accomplished.Labels: Done
