Saturday, November 10, 2012

Coimetrophobia

 I woke up this morning with a plan:  to do a little living room furniture shopping this morning (just looking, not buying anything yet was the plan we were going with) with the family, then spending the afternoon at a nearby park doing some hiking and geocaching.

Long story short the couch and arm chair are on order, and my new man-chair is in the back of the van waiting to be brought into the house.

All this means two things a) I don't need to look at any more couches, and b) I didn't have time to go for my planned hike.  So after lunch I executed "Plan B" (cause when you are a geocacher, nothing sounds more official than a Plan B), and headed off to do a cache in Morganton NC (just 20 minutes down the road) called "Coimetrophobia or Mappers Delight" (GC19N2C).

(Since you are wondering, and to save the inevitable Google search, coimetrophobia means "an abnormal and persistent fear of cemeteries" - you're welcome.)

The cache is a 5 part puzzle cache that takes the cacher to 4 cemeteries to gather information, and the final is just off another cemetery.

The cache description recommended marking each stage on a map, as a symbol will be revealed by connecting the dots.  I didn't have a paper map of the area, so I brought my laptop along in the van and used custom Google Maps to mark each stage.  This mapping isn't actually required, but I am glad I did it.  I was able to use satellite view to sanity check each stage as I could confirm it brought me to another cemetery.  I was also able to detect an error I made calculating the final coordinates as my first calculation ended up with coordinates that didn't match the pattern (turns out I made a mistake when gathering the information I needed).  Ain't technology awesome?

Once I grabbed the final, I took the opportunity to grab a few more caches in the area that I was unable to get to previously due to high muggle activity.  I ended up with 4 finds out of 5 for the day.

Cemeteries are always interesting to walk through as there is so much history. During my cemetery tour, I took a bunch of pictures.   I'll leave you with a sample of my day.

This is the grave of a Revolutionary War soldier by the name of John Duckworth.  Don't see that every day.