10 September 08 - 19:23
Drive By Geocaching
Yesterday I talked to our daughter to check her schedule since we are headed her direction. She said she had some free time during the day on Friday so we want to be in the Chicago area then. Dave and I picked a route from Forest City, IA, to Chicago and I began researching sites and camping places along the way. I ended up with a list with 40 some entries knowing we wouldn't stop at anywhere near all of them since many are places to spend the night. Unknown to me, Dave was researching geocaches along that same route.This morning we slept late, did some computer stuff, and finally hit the road about 10:30 a.m. I asked Dave if we would have time to see many sights along the road but he indicated we needed to move at a fairly good pace if we are going to meet up with our daughter. So, I was surprised as we were approaching the very first small town on our route and he asked me to get out his GPS and see where the geocache there was. I asked him about timing and he decided it was probably too soon to be stopping so we drove on through town.
Then we came to Clearwater, IA, where the Surf Ballroom is located. This is where Buddy Holly played his last concert before the plane crash. It is still a concert hall but now has a museum as well. It was on my list of places to stop. It also has a cache so Dave had it's location in his GPS. We drove into their parking lot but it was way too early in the day for a concert hall to be open so we drove on. It was a neat building, though, brick with an arched roof.
Next we hit Mason City, IA, home of Meredith Wilson of Music Man fame. There's a cache near one of the sights memorializing him so it was on both our lists. For this one we got our of the RV and walked down a very pleasant walkway but when we realized we'd have to go down a fairly steep hill, we went back to the RV and drove on without looking further for the cache. While in town we stopped at WalMart for groceries, Radio Shack for an adapter to connect Dave's headphones to his new piano keyboard, and Arby's for lunch.
Then we headed on down the road to the next geocache. This one was in Nora Springs, IA, and is the location of a geological oddity; Dave said something about glacial rock being in the wrong place or something like that. But the road was closed. We didn't see the oddity but we saw the dam that broke, apparently in this Spring's flood, that was just upstream of the closed road.
In Charles City, we came upon more road closed signs but we turned off before we got to that closure and found a paved rails-to-trails path. Finally, we actually found a geocache!
As we drove away from that one we had to dodge some low hanging tree branches. I used to like tree shaded streets. I still do as long as they are not threatening our roof.
I was amused by the unfortunate name of the man running for sheriff there when I saw the sign that said Lynch for Sheriff. Sure enough, shortly after that we saw a sign where someone had, apparently, painted out the word "for".
Dave then explained to me that, for him, the fun of geocaching is reading the information about odd places then seeing those places. Actually finding a cache is a bonus. So he felt we were having a successful day. We hadn't made many of my stops but I'd rather have time with our daughter so I was OK with the stops we did make.
That was the last of the geocaches Dave had marked along the stretch we were traveling so I napped while he drove. The road we were on was so bumpy that my seatbelt tightened up by my neck and locked there. I woke up needing to unfasten my seat belt to keep from being choked. This is a fact of life for us short people. If we move the seat forward far enough to be able to rest our feet on the floor, we can get strangled by a seat belt. I still always wear my seatbelt, though, since I think not doing so is more hazardous.
Finally, it was time to look for a place to stop for the night. I had several choices on my list but the one that appealed most to me was Spook Cave & Campground in McGregor, IA. You can tour Spook Cave by boat which sounded interesting to me. Unfortunately, when we got there we couldn't figure out where you registered to camp or where the cave was, the laundry room did not smell like a place I wanted to do laundry, and the Union Pacific Railroad's mainline ran along the edge of the campground. So we drove to the other side of town to Pikes Peak State Park and camped among the trees with electrical hookups for $16. That's my kind of place. Dave's, too.
TTYL,
Linda
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