Geocaching May 2023

The month of May started off quietly, especially since I only needed to fill two days on the calendar.

My first find was The Ice Cream Comb..., another cryptically named cache. The container did have a fake ice cream cone in it. I'm not sure what the "comb" part was. Ground zero was in some woods behind an office building. I went straight to the tree below, figuring it was the cache site, but it was not. At least it was picture-worthy.

No cache here

My next find was Columbia Dog Park, which is indeed near the Columbia Dog Park next to Cedar Lane Park. The find was fairly easy in middle Spring, but I feel the undergrowth will take over soon!

View back to civilization from the cache

Then I found my 800th cache, an easy find on a roadside near my kids' orthodontist. Holiday Joy Cache... is yet another "..." cache in my area. The weather was glorious.

Nearby road looks 800 years old!

I am near the cache but not near 800 years old!

#801 was A New Year's Gift, a previous DNF (Did Not Find) for me. The cache owner put out a new container at an easier to reach location. No need to go into the cemetery!

A hidden-away cemetery

Also nearby is Ximenez, an easy find after solving the online puzzle. Too bad it wasn't lunchtime or I'd have had plenty of good options for eats!

Sadly, not hungry

Later on, I found two mystery caches whose final locations were in the same shopping center. First, The Mystery Box was a pandemic-era cache that had me finishing a lot (and I mean a lot) of online jigsaw puzzles to get the final coordinates. It took a couple of weeks of ten minutes here and ten minutes there.

View from the cache

Then I found Fun With Syllables, another puzzle, this time matching together syllables to solve clues and get the coordinates. It was more fun that the previous one.

Far from the muggle shopping

On a day off school, I took the kids to Fairland Regional Park to find some caches. We started by the ball fields and found 42(1-31-19 - 10-24-72), a tribute to Jackie Robinson. 42 was his jersey number and the dates are his birth and death. My youngest made the find before I did!

By the ball field, naturally

On a bridge we found Crash's Lunch Time Cache #4. Sadly, I needed the hint to clue in to the right spot for the find.

Hanging at GZ

Further south in the park we found another bridge with an Earthcache, River Bank Erosion. I learned a bit about how rivers and streams get bendy and have different sides in the bends. Then I looked off the bridge and answered some questions about the erosion happening on the Little Paint Branch (which feeds into the Anacostia River, one of the rivers that go by Washington, D.C.).

Looking serious, or maybe hypnotized

Since we weren't far away, we went for LoZ Series: Forest Temple Intro. This is part of the Legend of Zelda series in the greater Maryland area. This set has five caches in the park, though the rest are further north on the opposite side of the Little Paint Branch from where we parked. We will work on the rest of the series another day. The hide was right by a dirt bike challenge area.

Bike park in the woods

Bush Forest Ruins is the home of some ancient (by American standards) ruins. It's a virtual cache, so there is no container to find and no log to sign. I had to collect some information from a memorial stone and take a picture of me at the ruins.

Self in the ruins

The ruins

I finished off the last empty day on my calendar with two caches in Columbia, Maryland. Spot Runs Again! is a mystery cache that has a logic problem to solve in order to get the right coordinates. I love logic problems, so this was a no-brainer (hmmm...that's not the right adjective) for me. The container was rewarding too!

Such a cute container!

A rest stop in the woods

Frank Ryman (Resurrection) is by a grave in the middle of the woods. Wyman was a Civil War soldier who was born in 1838 in Syracuse, New York. He enlisted in August, 1861, and was discharged in June, 1865, while stationed in Alexandria, Virginia. He married a Virginia lady and moved to the Columbia area (though the town of Columbia did not exist at that point) where he kept a farm. He died in 1880.

Frank Wyman grave

Info on the sign (click to enlarge)

The month ends with a full calendar for May and a grand total of 811 finds.