November 15, 2009: Sun Prairie, Madison, Windsor, and DeForest, Wisconsin

From the beginning of September until last weekend, I was completely occupied with work at my home. I was really looking forward to getting out for a while. However, the weather is now colder and the leaves have all dropped. Not a pretty time of the year for outdoor activities. Hunting season is also upon us, and that means I should stay out of harms way by sticking to urban areas.

Just to get in the swing of things again, I chose a driving route with several geocaches that I could just park and find. I actually don't find this kind of activity nearly as satisfying as a nice, adventurous nature hike. I just decided to take what I could this time out and plan up something better the next time.

I started out in the township of Burke, just south of Sun Prairie. On the land that was once the town dump is now a park built on top of the landfill. I remember coming here a time or two as a child with my grandfather when it was still the town dump. It looks and smells much nicer today.







I keep finding these shelters built in parks and I just keep taking photos of them.


It's not a long walk amongst the trails, only about 8/10 of a mile round trip.





Here is the geocache location.





A bit of a story here. This geocache is a replacement for another that was located in the exact same location several years ago. New cache owner, new name. I had logged the original one years ago, and this one was a no-brainer to find since it's the very same spot. Still get credit for another find with this one.

Now let's hit the road and drive within a couple miles of where I work in Madison. This geocache is boy scout-centric. When I arrived I found out why.


The geocache is planted right alongside of a local scouting store and offices. Just park conveniently in their lot.


Can you believe I walked right by this? I actually went past the hiding spot and began searching just beyond, and failed to figure that out for a while.


Just picked it up and sat down at the picnic table a few steps away to sign the log.


Yes, this is the lazy-man's geocaching kind of day. Next stop is a short drive to a very nearby truck-stop. As soon as I stepped out of my Jeep, the gps receiver was pointing off in this direction. I could easily guess that the hiding spot was that utility box up on the hill.


The bigger challenge was guessing how to open the container. This one was built in the "pipe-bomb" method. I understand that this is cheap and weathertight, but really, it's begging to be mistaken as a bomb by some unsophisticated person someday.





Here's the view of the truck-stop from the hiding spot. I grabbed one of the 3 travel bugs that were inside of this geocache.


Now on to a dead-end road in the Windsor township.


Better concealed than many of this type of geocache at least. I was kicking around the litter in the area for a while looking for it.


Off to DeForest and another dead-end off the freeway. The pink elephant in the distance is a bit of a local landmark.


There it is. (yawn)


Just for kicks, how about a really close look? (more yawns)


That was my 5th find. Took me about 90 minutes worth of work, mostly driving time. I had to stop at the store to pick up a few items, then made one more geocache find on the way home. This one was a couple miles from my home in Sun Prairie, at the base of a water tower. Didn't bother taking photos as I was hurrying a little. Six finds in all today, dropped off one travel bug, took another. I'll work harder at this next time.

Now I will get up on a soapbox for a while. Did this kind of activity seem exciting at all? This is the current trend in geocaching. Hiding small containers in dead-end streets, in small neighborhood parks in plain view of a couple of dozen homes. This and "puzzle caches" where you must have a PhD in ciphers in order to get the geocache coordinates. It seems like 75% of all new geocaches published are of this variety in the last 18 months. I don't like this trend. I have a hard time sifting through all of these garbage geocaches trying to find ones that I think will be of the more "adventure hike" variety. All that these style geocaches exist for is to pad the numbers of people trying to get multiple-thousand finds. They have their place, and are kind of exciting for families with young children, but they are becoming all too common, and making my trip planning very difficult sometimes. The worst part is from all the puzzle caches that I can't do. Because they might exist in a nice location, that prevents a more conventional geocache from being placed there. Now I'm missing out because I can't make heads or tails of how to turn an image like below into geocache coordinates.

(Sorry to Autumn, but this is a perfect example of my gripe)

Well, that's enough complaining now. Somebody else can stand on the soapbox.