April 12, 2010: Waterloo, Wisconsin

At last spring has sprung. A lot has happened since my last post. The big change was me leaving my old job of over 22 years and starting a new on in March. Quite a bit of activity related to that happened during the first months of this year.

With spring chores still waiting for me to do, I decided it was time to find a home for the travel bug I picked up last autumn. It had been years since I tried finding geocaches in the Waterloo area, so I planned a tour for there.

First stop, and what looked most interesting on paper is a park located on the end of what at first glance looked like a private drive. Garman Mounds park. A substantial marker at the trailhead.

Must be a good spot if native tribes buried their dead here.

Just some of the mounds to be seen from the trail. If you haven't seen indian mounds before, this is what they typically look like.

The geocache was located away from the sensitive areas.

I left the travel bug in there if anybody wants to go grab it now.

This place is a good-sized hill with some steep slopes. The trails had some good up-down elevation change. The trees not having leaves yet made for better visibility of the surrounding land.

Looks like this tree is trying to bend over and grab a person.

Well almost 2 miles of walking there, now there are a couple of quick geocaches on the drive to the other location I was interested in. Second stop of the day was at a cemetary.

Have you wondered what cemetary caretaker do with all the flowers, flowerpots, and other stuff left at gravesites after a while? At this cemetary they have a mound at the back of the property and dump everything behind it.

And near this pile of family grief is the geocache. It's inside the base of this tree.

You wouldn't know that was all there directly straight back behind that shed and trees.

On the road again for a short hop to a dead-end road into DNR hunting grounds. Here I already have retrieved the cache container from it's hiding spot.

Now I've put it back.

Spent way more time looking around and taking photos than I did retrieving the geocache.

It's all swamp land.

The next stop was an area I was looking forward to exploring. It's more of the DNR land to the south. However, I did not read the logs for this geocache, so I did not know that the recommended parking area did not have a direct trail to the location. So as I tried to navigate there and scout around, I just found swamp. The nasty deceptive kind of swamp land where it looks like it might be dry but the grass you step on just sinks into water as you go.

I never go closer than 0.25 miles from the location. When I took the photo below, my gps was pointing in the general direction of that observation blind, which looked like it was 0.25 miles away.

The land was just too wet and I was had drainage ditches to cross. I actually waded across one by this tree.

While I was sinking into ankle-deep wetland, I took these photos.

Stood on one of the few dry spots to take this shot of the ditch I had to cross-again.

Finishing the walk of shame, all empty-handed and wet up to my shins.

I did manage to trade for a couple of items in the earlier geocaches. Thank goodness I put a change of shoes in the Jeep. Pants and socks were still wet though.

I checked my map on the gps, and decided to visit this last spot nearby. It's a "virtual" geocache, no container. I have to gather information at the locaton in order to email an answer to a question and get credit for the find.

The location is a very old cemetary. The earliest graves appear to date to before Wisconsin was a state. Here's a memorial to 2 brothers that died in the Civil War.

It really was easy to find photo subjects here. However I am reminded once again by the dilapidated conditions here why I want to be cremated.

So now I'm driving into Marshall, Wisconsin and I decided to stop and take some photos by Little A-Merrick-A. This mallard family let me take their portrait.

This dairy farm nearly engulfed by urban sprawl just fascinates me.

Here's the overview of my walking. I didn't bother removing the driving from the track log because it was getting to be too much work. You can see the one I had to turn around and leave on the right side, and another I had saved the location to and chose not to go after in my wet pants. I was hoping for 4 miles of walking, but it turned out to be more like 3 miles.