Geocaching Log - Sept. 13, 2007 - Afternoon Trip

Cache Overview
1) rick's 52 @ N 38° 57.307 W 094° 52.552
2) Oh those falls @ N 38° 56.571 W 094° 53.262

Acquired: Toy Mini-Cooper
Left: John Deere Tractor TB, Stress Relief Football

I decided to check out second batch of caches today on my way to a gaming night in Kansas City. Both of these locations were very close to each other along K-10, so they were right on the way!

rick's 52 @ N 38° 57.307 W 094° 52.552

Rick's 52 had a neat little location off from a nature trail that ran a course along the edge of a small lake. It's amazing that I drive past these neat little places every week, totally unaware of their presence! I was able to park fairly near the trail and did the usual routine of following the trail toward the cache location. This time, the cache was only about 100 feet off the trail. Due to the margin of error when using a GPS unit, I had to do a little searching once I got to the supposed location. Turns out the cache was a good 50 feet away from where my unit told me it was, but I was able to find it with little problem. This one was an artillery box hung from a chain on the trunk of a tree.

After cracking the case open, I searched through it but didn't really find anything interesting. The one marginally interesting item was a small animal skull, but it had been broken into multiple pieces and was beginning to disintegrate, so I decided to leave it there. Since there were also a few crop fields somewhat near this cache location, it seemed a suitable place for the John Deere Tractor TB that I had found earlier in the day, so I left it in the box for someone else to discover and continue its journey. Checking out the TB's log in geocaching.com, the tractor has visited, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Kansas so far (no idea how it skipped from KY to KS). Where it goes next is anybody's guess!

Since the cache didn't take as long as I had expected, I took a few moments to park my butt on a bench along the pond and watched a few ducks for a bit before heading to the next cache.

Oh those falls @ N 38° 56.571 W 094° 53.262

This cache was just on the opposite side of K-10 from rick's 52 making it another quick stop on my way to Kansas City. As I got out of my car, I could hear the faint rush of a waterfall. Judging from the name of the cache, I didn't even bother switching on my GPS unit and followed my ears and was fairly amazed to find a 20 foot high waterfall gushing over a limestone formation, right alongside a fairly busy street right between Lenexa and Olathe. Who'd a thunk? After spending 15 minutes or so checking out the falls, I decided to start looking for the cache.

Not really knowing where to look, I switched on my unit and was led to a fairly large pile of limestone rocks about 50 feet down the sidewalk from the falls. It took me way longer than it should have but I finally caught a glimpse of the box, which had been very well hidden in the rocks by the last cacher. After clearing out enough rocks to finally pull the box out, I opened the box to find it contained a Jayhawk travel bug that was designed to travel the KC metro area.

It was also interesting that this TB was part of a larger geocaching puzzle. There are some pretty complex geocaches out there that involve much more than simply finding a box in a single location. Attached to this Jayhawk TB was a dog tag with another set of coordinates (presumably for another cache, but possibly not). The trick is that this travel bug was part of a three part TB puzzle. There are two more travel bugs floating around out there with more clues as to the solution. The other clues might contain some sort of code that is required to modify the coordinates I found; they might contain a distance and bearing that I need to travel from my found coordinates; but the gist of it is that these coordinates would probably do me no good on their own. At any rate, I jotted down the coordinates just in case I have the opportunity to complete the puzzle some day.

Since I don't really travel around KC very much, I decided to leave the Jayhawk TB there and chose a toy mini-cooper instead, leaving a small stress relief football in return. After signing the log, I packed the cache back into the rock pile for the next lucky cacher to find and went on my way to Kansas City for some hot hot gaming action with the rest of the gamers at Tabletop Games.