Geocaching for the Blonde

21 May, 2011

According to Harold Camping, today is supposed to be the Rapture.  What better way to spend the last day than geocaching with my brother Woodhick803 and my sister-in-law Wiscongranny?  It was a beautiful day for the Rapture; the first sunny and almost hot day in weeks and weeks.

Now let me state that I keep my hair blonde for a couple of reasons.  The most obvious one is that it somewhat hides the gray that insists upon showing up in greater and greater amounts every day.  The second reason is that I can easily explain away my failure to download today's caches into my GPS.  There must be a good punch line there somewhere:  "Did you hear about the blonde who went geocaching without downloading the co-ordinates for the sites?"   Argh....

Bowles Falls, not too far off I-77 at Sandstone, is beautiful!  I imagine this spot is cool and refreshing even during summer's hottest days.  Here you see Woodhick803 trying his best not to fall in the water.  We made this find harder than it was, wandering into some terrain that would be marked as a 5 (the higher the number, the rougher the terrain), only to spot the cache from the other side of the creek.

WARNING!!!  This place does NOT sell ice cream.  It sells tacky WV memorabilia.  It sells country cutesy decor stuff.  It sells junk food.  It even sells beer.  But it does NOT sell ice cream.  Can you imagine?  A geocaching staple.  No wonder the parking lot is deserted.

Geocaching gives me a great excuse to go tromping through the woods and to see places unknown to me.  This cache was found off the Tom Honaker Road, between Hinton and Athens, WV.  Easy hike, but what was so nice was listening to all the birds singing, something I miss by being a "town girl" now.

 Woodhick actually found this cache, so I'm not sure why Wiscongranny and I are posing for the photo.


There were other caches to be found  - some in the woods, some urban caches too.  We finally did get our ice cream and also had a terrific dinner at Outback.  The Rapture didn't happen - other than when we felt rapture at finding well hidden caches.

For more about today's adventure, check out Woodhick803's blog.  I'm sure he's going to be harping about blondes who forget to download their caches.  What do you want to bet?
 http://cachingin--geocachingme.blogspot.com/  (Oh wow - he hasn't posted his blog yet.  I'm off the hook for a bit longer.)

And for more about geocaching in general, visit http://www.geocaching.com/.

In the meantime, get outside and play!  (And remember to download your caches.)

There are Giants Among Us

Don Quixote battled the windmill, thinking it was a ferocious giant.  If he would ever have the chance to visit the Beech Ridge Energy Project, I believe that he would either (a) drop further into insanity, or (b) be frightened out of it altogether.

The first stop of the latest geocaching trip was a visit to "Don Quixote's Nightmare," a cache located on Beech Ridge in Greenbrier County, West Virginia.  The cache itself was a lot of fun, being a multi-part, and having me read countless scraps of paper for the co-ordinates for part two, only to have dear brother (and the owner of this cache) to point out to me that the co-ordinates were written in plain sight.  Argh!

Hopping quickly out of the truck to get a good look at this giant, I was first impressed, obviously, by the sheer enormity of this wind generator.  Woodhick803 told me that the generator is about 390' in height at its tallest - that's more than a football field! 

Secondly, I was impressed by how quiet it was.  There was a slight whooshing sound, but nothing that was obnoxious.  More like white noise.

It was a little disconcerting, though, to look up at the blades and see the clouds moving.  Intellectually I knew that the generator was well-seated and stable, but with the clouds moving it gave all appearances to be falling.  Very eerie.



Each blade is approximately 100 feet long.  Here you can see a blade on the ground and more wind generators in the background.  There are 64 windmills here, making it a small wind farm.

Size matters!  Here I am standing in the part of the blade that would be attached at the hub.  I'm 5'4" and there's still room over my head.

Again, size matters!  As stated earlier, I'm 5'4" and there's at least that much of the blade above me, making this part at least 10' high.

This is the smallest part of the blade.

These blades were damaged somehow, probably in transportation.  I'm thankful that Invenergy has left them there on the ground so you can actually get some idea of the massiveness of these guys.

By the way, the wind farm is located on a county road so there is no problem getting up there to see them. 


This was definitely the highlight of the day.  I've been trying to think of the best superlative to describe them, but even "awesome" and "magnificent" don't seem to do these giants the justice they deserve.

To read more about the day, check out Woodhick803's blog:  http://cachingin--geocachingme.blogspot.com/

Get outside and play!