INTERNATIONAL GEOCACHING DAY & A DINNER THAT COULDN'T BE BEAT

If an area can be judged as being "wilderness" or "civilized" because of the availability (or lack thereof) of the Dairy Queen chain of "Hot Eats, Cool Treats" (their words, not mine) stores along with the availability of really high end cuisine, then Pearisburg VA is the most urban center we have yet visited during our Geocaching adventures. More on that later.

Saturday August 20th, 2011 was declared to be the first International Geocaching Day by the powers in charge of the only somewhat organized sport/hobby of Geocaching, Groundspeak International. So of course our group--BatikFreak10, Wiscongranny, and obviously yours truly, Woodhick803--headed out bright and early for what would prove to be an extremely long but highly successful cache hunting trip.

Our trip was centered upon the small town of Narrows VA, but that simply meant that our area of treasure hunting would extend from near Glyn Lyn VA east to Pembroke VA. These towns are only a very few miles from Narrows. It is possible to adjust search areas by diameter from a center point or even along an extended route.

Wiscongranny (wife person Joyce) and BatikFreak10 (sister Sally) show off a find near Glyn Lyn, located in a nice town park and huge camping area. Events going on here while we we were cache hunting included a multi-day tent revival (Baptist I bet) featuring some "well known" (his words I bet) evangelist and a concurrent Old Fiddlers gathering. The fiddlers seemed to be having more fun. As you can see, even with all that activity we were still in an isolated area of the park. Nice place, and useful on many levels.

Our caching day moved quickly to the town of Pearisburg VA. I had only ever visited Pearisburg once or twice in the past while hiking on the Appalachian Trail--the AT passes right through the town--and remembered it as being sleepy and generally down trodden. Things have changed. It's still a small town, but seems quite lively and doing OK in these hard times. Here's a nice civic display of tiles, each individually hand made by local citizens and displaying items of interest to that maker and hopefully everyone else.

Pearisburg is also home to a set of four (I think) wall murals spread around the town but close enough together so as to provide a nice walking tour. BatikFreak10 caught this one. Most photography in this posting is courtesy of BF10.

Yep, Pearisburg is civilized alright. Our now obligatory stop for afternoon ice cream was here, an actual Dairy Queen, and one in good shape and fairly modern too. The Blizzard treats were large and cold. Great on a hot day.

I'm logging in on one of our last finds for the day. We managed to crowd in 15 finds and 2 DNF's (did not finds) for the day.

DNF's are usually pretty depressing for me. I consider them as a sign of personal failure on some level, but these two were different. We knew before heading to the cache locations that the caches were, in all probability, missing. Several DNF's had been logged at each cache before we went to the locations. We headed to the locations to simply verify that they were indeed missing...and they were.

Our day had been long, we didn't finish our hunting until about 6:00p.m., supper time by any standard. When we were in downtown Pearisburg we had noted a restaurant called The Bank located in a turn of the 19th-20th century bank building, what we found was beyond belief. Most (all?) small towns are not blessed with high quality, gourmet dining. Pearisburg has it in spades in The Bank. Major cities many have one or more restaurants of this quality. Small towns? Almost unheard of. Pearisburg, that most sophisticated of small towns, who'd have thought. A Dairy Queen and The Bank, all within two blocks of each other.

The only down note for the day: While we were searching for our cache target (successfully as it turned out), Joyce took what might have been a terrible fall after missing a step at the civic tile display pictured above. She ended up with a skinned nose and a badly bruised hand from catching herself while falling. We cleaned up the scuffed nose and skinned knees and continued on our way. Joyces' call on that decision. I guess when you have cache scratch fever, nothing is going to stand in the way. As this is being written she sports a bruised right hand and two "quarterback smudges" under her eyes but no real damage all things considered.

THEY AIN'T NO DURRY QUEENS IN THE WILDERNESS

Yesterday Joyce and I took a day off from our busy schedules (why are you laughing?) and went for a long drive up past the Cass area and into Virginia. We also took along the GC'ing gear in hopes of "bagging a few" while out riding around. Little did we know that we were about to descend into what can only be described as a cultural wilderness.

We had driven up through Durbin (lunch at a local diner was surprising good) and then continued across Rt U.S.250 into Virginia, bagging caches as they appeared along our route.

Later, as we made our way towards home, it came to be time for the now customary ice cream stop-and not a Dairy (pronounced Durry--don't ask) Queen to be found. In fact, as we mentally reviewed our travels up to that point, we realized that we were in what can only be described as a Durry Queen wasteland. Not one had we seen all day!!

Then, rescue in Churchville VA!! Not a Dairy Queen, but a useable substitute. Thank goodness for the Tastee Freez. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to survive.

5 for 5 on the day and no DNF's.

By the way, if you are reading this you may be called upon to post bail at some point in the future. We tend to run the back roads at what can only be described as criminally high speeds.