People say you can forecast the winter weather by looking at the banding on woolly worms - the larvae of the Isabella Tiger Moth - Pyrrharctia isabella.I don't know if that's true, but the weather yesterday afternoon was excellent. We went geocaching for the first time in several months.
Since we were on our 399th cache find we decided to do a couple of puzzles. The first one was 19th Century American Authors - Edgar Allan Poe. Both the puzzle and finding the cache were pretty easy for that one. It was in a neighborhood park where we saw a lot of birds, a spider, and a very thorny Black Hawthorne tree.
The cache we did for our 400th find was called Tracklines. We had to match some trails drawn on the cache description to a map. I thought the trails would be in Forest Park, but after Sami and I spent an hour or so looking at the map with no luck, we each got on our computers and tried to come up with other solutions. I thought Google Earth might help because it shows other parks in the area and I figured I could look up their webpages and hopefully some trails. Just then Sami called from upstairs saying he'd located the area. He'd read the other finder's logs on the geocaching website that also recommended Google Earth. He didn't bother looking for parks, but spotted the trails themselves, clearly visible on the aerial photographs.
The hike in to tracklines was not too long, about 3/4 of a mile. It was my first "hike" since my sprained ankle. The final trail was covered in blackberries. Fortunately Sami knew that it would be (from reading the logs) and had brought garden gloves and pruning shears. We saw a cool purple flower with a caterpillar on it, more spiders, some mushrooms,some little pink flowers and the woolly worm of course. The fall color on the hillsides was beautiful and the sky was full of fluffy white clouds.
When we finally found the cache we discovered that it had a secret message inside with clues needed for the location of another geocache. Unfortunately we left our trade items back in the car, but we took Harley's Mouse from the cache and will move him along to another one later this week.
BTW We took so many pictures yesterday that I didn't put them all in the blog post. The highlighted words are links to the photos or other useful information.
The cache we did for our 400th find was called Tracklines. We had to match some trails drawn on the cache description to a map. I thought the trails would be in Forest Park, but after Sami and I spent an hour or so looking at the map with no luck, we each got on our computers and tried to come up with other solutions. I thought Google Earth might help because it shows other parks in the area and I figured I could look up their webpages and hopefully some trails. Just then Sami called from upstairs saying he'd located the area. He'd read the other finder's logs on the geocaching website that also recommended Google Earth. He didn't bother looking for parks, but spotted the trails themselves, clearly visible on the aerial photographs.
The hike in to tracklines was not too long, about 3/4 of a mile. It was my first "hike" since my sprained ankle. The final trail was covered in blackberries. Fortunately Sami knew that it would be (from reading the logs) and had brought garden gloves and pruning shears. We saw a cool purple flower with a caterpillar on it, more spiders, some mushrooms,some little pink flowers and the woolly worm of course. The fall color on the hillsides was beautiful and the sky was full of fluffy white clouds.
When we finally found the cache we discovered that it had a secret message inside with clues needed for the location of another geocache. Unfortunately we left our trade items back in the car, but we took Harley's Mouse from the cache and will move him along to another one later this week.
BTW We took so many pictures yesterday that I didn't put them all in the blog post. The highlighted words are links to the photos or other useful information.
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