Sunday, April 03, 2011

The Journey To Space Coast

The past few days have been a mini adventure for us.  My wifes parents are in Florida on their annual RV vacation, and since we are (relatively) close by we decided to take a long weekend and visit them.

The drive is only 10 hours, however we have two issues to deal with:  a) We are in possession of a  17 month old kid who doesn't like being trapped in a car seat for 10 hours and b) I'm a geocacher, I need time to find tupperware in the woods.  We decided to take two days.  So on Wednesday afternoon we packed up the car and hit the road.

The Sheldon Ruins
I didn't plan on caching the first day, but as it turns out many rest areas along the interstates have caches at them, so I managed to snag one while Zeke was taking a much needed car break.  That night we stayed in St. George SC.   The next day is where the real adventure began.

Our second stop was our most interesting cache.  It was at the Sheldon Ruins, a church that was built in 1755, burned by the British in 1779, rebuilt in 1826, and reburnt in1865 by the Federal Army.  The south may rise again, but this church apparently is down for the count.

The site is a virtual cache (no container to find, but rather information to gather, in this case information from the gravestones on site).

F4C Phantom
Other caches included another virtual at the Mighty 8th Air Wing Air Museum.  The site contained an F4C Phantom, and a MiG 17.  It was a nice distraction on a long drive.

The Cat In The Hat
The final cache was found at a Cracker Barrel in Titusville Florida, 300ft from our hotel.   We had to wait until after supper, and wait out an elderly couple who were sitting right beside then cache before I could make the grab.  After 15 minutes the couples table was ready so they got up and left.  30 seconds later I had the cache in hand.  All in all I found 6 caches, and was able to check off 2 states from my list of states I've cached in - Georgia and Florida.

The last interesting piece of information about the drive to Florida was when we stopped at a tourist information center because we were a) tourists, b) in need of a break, and most importantly c) they had free orange juice. (hey, my wife is Dutch - they never let free things pass them by).

The center had a really cool statue of The Cat In The Hat.
<-- See?

While there we bought admission tickets for the Kennedy Space Center (foreshadowing of a future blog post - hint hint).

Stay tuned.