Cache Slam for Saturday

After waking up, eating breakfast and taking the laundry to the “wash n fluff” I went “CACHING”! I picked two caches on different sides of town so it would be a learning experience. The first was SW down by FSU campus and the other was on Thomasville Road (61) to the NE.

I did not take any pictures of the first cache but I should have – the area was good and no spiders or other biting or poison things (like IVY). I carefully lifted the cache cover and then picked up the cache container – walla, something sort of large went into a hole very quickly – and a big spider or something (scorpion?) disappeared into a hole immediately. Carefully, I opened the cache and signed the log -taking nothing and leaving nothing – re-sealed it and put it into the hole and re-covered it.

The second cache at Betton Road (at Mitchel?) Cemetery was relatively easy but was interesting and worth the visit. A sign at the entrance tells the story of this small plot. The cache was not hidden well and I made a photo of it, logged the find and re-covered it better than found. After that I looked at the grave sites (only a few markers exist and most of those were after 1900 and ended near 1945. I took a picture of one headstone that was inscribed by hand – one can only imagine the life story of the deceased and the inscriber – what a story that would make.

Thus ends my geocaching day. Tomorrow more adventure awaits the intrepid hunter(s). I think I have a budding cacher in the grooming so we may hit the road for the Southern Coast to find a real hard one.

Long Week

Here we are with Labor Day weekend approaching – summer lake season will be officially over on Monday and I think I used the boat once this summer. Man, time does fly.

This week was a long one with an average of 12 hour days. This means driving constantly for 12 hours and logging about 275 miles. The average mph is pretty slow due to the remote areas and condition of the roads once found. We did take just a few minutes to take some pictures of one rural site and a cemetary (Bell Cemetery) we came across way out in the wilderness at the end of a no name road in no man’s land. It was time for a break & pit stop so we just took a few pictures during this short respite. The family seemed to be short lived as there were a lot of young people in here. Shortly after leaving the road was blocked by a fallen tree which I had to move. Just after the previous picture was taken a spider (looked like a recluse to me) ran across my hand – man, did I jump.

Wed-Long Days

Long days are ahead and past days have been longer.

Sunday -082403

Another weekend day for Geocaching! The weather was absolutely beautiful today – not too hot and very sunny with no TB’s or rain: I guess since Scott went home it turned nice.

I did three caches today – two were successful and the third was a scouting mission since the lake levels are so high. This scouted one is on the opposite shore from the Little Big Dog Cache of yesterday but is much too wet to try without waterproof boots and I do not have boots. I did log a find at the Goose Pond Cache & Recycled Road (a virtual cache).

The Recycled Road cache is a interesting road that is paved with an item in a house that is replaced every decade or so ( I cannot tell since someone might visit this site trying to find the answer). To get to this cache you follow Miccosukee Road from Tallahassee via a canopy road that is very beautiful and the speed limit is 45 MPH so you can enjoy the road: The site is way out in the country and is quite rural Florida in nature. There are a lot of plantations on the way.

Goose Pond cache was much more of a challenge and the way was full of woods spiders and poison ivy: I wore long pants and long sleeve shirt plus bug spray. The biggest spider I encountered had a 4-5′ diameter web and was about 3″ in diameter and was reminiscent of a Indiana Corn Spider found in corn fields. The cache itself was normal looking once I homed in on it – the GPS took me to within about 50′ and then I had to hunt and peck. That got me real close and the clue of a crack in the tree put me there. Here is the cache box after I re-hid it.

Enough of the tales and trails for today. Hope you found it interesting enough to read the whole thing….BFN.

Saturday – and Geocaching!

Today is my day of rest; except, I went Geocaching in Tallahassee! While not the same without my geocaching partner SAM, it does divert my attention from more emotional issues of the day. Today I took the time to take some pictures of this find – it had a higher rating in difficulty and terrain so I thought it might be worthwhile showing my “sport”.

The main trail to the site started as a good, wide and pretty one with good scenery for about 0.3 miles. There were several forks in the road but with the GPS marking the way it is easy to get out of trouble being lost. The trail had a “central” forking station and the GPS said to take the most small, bad trail of the central station. The geocache page for the cache described a big oak tree so I was hoping it was this one. Well, as you can see it was the big tree described and I made the cache mine! This was a 2/2.5 cache (Difficulty/Terrain).

In addition, I logged a 1/1 cache that was in the area and at the entrance to a very nice housing estate. I have no pictures as the area was not conducive to taking pictures due to people coming and going and looking strangely at me.

This ends the Geocaching Blog – you should try it some time. It gets you outside, exersizes and stimulates the thought process. BFN….

WiFi-Gainesville

Man, I was up until 0200 this early AM working with SAM getting our server back up. Then at the crack of dawn the team drove towards Gainesville area to do some WMS testing. It was sort of a late start and we had computer problems – the one I am writing on too: I guess it was the heat. They just started to get wierd answers and things. So here I am at the Comfort Inn in Gainesville on a 802.11b network that is a bit wierd too. I am not sure if it will pass the data or not so this will be short and all until tomorrow and I can get a reliable internet connection…

Dabbling

This evening Keith & I went to Quiznos Sub on Monroe Street here in Tallahassee. We have decided that we like this place and will eat here often as it seems to be better than Subway: the food is hot. I the course of this evenings conversation, the subject of the pictures we took last Sunday while in historic downtown Tallahassee was briefly touched upon. With no further adieu here are 3 of many we took.

The old tree is by a church downtown and the whole area is worth two or three hours for a tour. On the self-guided tour we saw many, many trees covered extensively with Spanish Moss. As we approached the State buildings the latest addition to downtown was spotted and Keith felt obligated to pay hommage to the Dolphins.

As I get time I will have future versions of this travel log blog. Maybe some Geocaching sites too. However, no one wants to go into the forests with me for fear of the mosquitoes and other unknown bad forest creatures.

Panama City North

I spent an interesting day as the navigator for the voice testing of some simulcast area grids. Everything went very well I thought since I only had one dropped call all day – this is pretty impressive. You would be even more impressed with the remoteness of the area in parts of the central panhandle. The Delorme Street Atlas shows roads but when you get there the roads are reall two tracks and you can go for 5 miles and then find a gate blocking a county road. So what do you do? Well, you go all the way around only to find the roblocked on the other side with 3 miles in between the two gates. It sort of reminds one of the old wild west and midwest where the land owners put up toll gates and charged for crossing the land.

Today when we got back to home base hotel, I revamped the My Humor section of the website to make two pages as the time to load of the humor page was becoming too long. Now I have a shorter main humor page and an archived humor page: much nicer I think.

2nd 8/17/03

OK, I am back but not sure what to say. Hum, how about Keith going to CompUSA and getting a wireless mouse for $9.99? I want one! I saw it work and for the price it is great – you can be at oblique angles and up to about 6-10′ away and still use it. the bad news is it is 27MHz and right in or near the CB band so I suspect that if a 100W kicker is outside your room you might get some interesting responses. I cannot wait to get a service monitor near the mouse to see what it is really doing RF-wise. I’ll get one soon.

Well, I have to go to the Chinese Super Buffet and then pack for the week on the road. BFN..

Sunday 08/17/03

Thursday and Friday were spent touring the remotest parts of the Florida Central Panhandle, well, actually Panama City area. A guy named Woody was the navigator and I was the driver. The vehicle was a Ford 4X4 and the 4X4 was needed to traverse these unpaved and unimproved (in many, many cases) sand roads. One noteable mud hole was about 2-3′ deep and real slimy on the bottom as all wheels were churning but we made it through with little speed to spare. If you want to try it just get a DeLorme Street Atlas or Microsoft Streets & Trips (much cheaper and nicer map to read), A GPS capable of connecting to COM or USB ports and a big jug of water plus cell phone for when you get stuck (and you will get stuck). A wench is a good option too but we did not have this. We actually finished all the grids on time by Friday afternoon.

Geocaching was the name of the day for Saturday and a second visit to the main Tallahassee Library netted the third find for this area. A Sunday jaunt to the San Luis Mission Park ended in a “no find” due to a number of reasons but one being the GPS only had one Sat under the dense follage. The next two reasons are it was raining and I was alone and did not have the added incentive. So, I think this one will go down as a no-return and a no-find. Tallahassee is full of caches of all types so there is no end to places to visit finds or no finds.

I signed up for dial in internet access provider DialAccess.Net so I can stay in touch in the remotest areas of Florida. During the week much of the time will be spent in hotels with no hi-speed bandwidth so dial in is the only option. As a result I get a new email and it is csjmoore@dialaccess.net . Of course my old emails will work too.

I finally got to the bottom of the no SMTP from the Wingate Hotel where I am staying. The problem related to the SSL and authentication requirements. It was easy once I got past the tier one people and experimented a bit. This is a nice hotel with friendly staff and hi-speed bandwidth plus the price is right.

I have still not fixed the IE6+ error yet and I am still crashing with frequent regularity. This has happened befor but I cannot get my hands on the MS documents to correct it. Therefore, I have to go befor I lose this snipet of blog -bye.