North Carolina Geocacher's Organization Fall Fling 2009

What a day! My wife, daughter and two grandchildren got up early on Saturday morning to battle the misty weather and headed south from Greensboro, NC to the Murrow Mountain State Park, a distance of about 70 miles south. We picked up a few caches on the way and arrived for registration about 9 a.m. I really enjoyed meeting some people with whom I've corresponded in the past but had never met. Since the kids games weren't going to start for another hour my grandson and I headed out to find the closest earthcache, Three Beautiful Old-Timers (GC1KKKM), located atop Hattaway Mountain in the park. I never dreamed that there were volcanoes in this part of the state. You learn a lot with earthcaches. This was some climb but not nearly as difficult as the high elevation climbs in Ecuador. The trip down the mountain was more difficult due to the wet leaves. We made it back and Brandon participated in the children's games. He was in the scavenger hunt, the bean bag toss, a rocket launching game, ammo can painting and helped bust the pinata. His sister got involved in some of these activities too. HeadHardHat was there with his Geosnippets promotion. He has a tutorial that teaches about geocaching on-line. He was interviewing geocachers for his program. I had the chance to share about Ecuador caching. Rain set in so our family took to the car and headed out to find some geocaches that the NCGO had set out just for the participants. We had our first North American FTF today with NCGO Road Overlook (Fall Fling GeoJig3) (GC1ZXGQ) and found a lot of other caches to boot. We came back to the Fall Fling in time for the kids to get their prizes for the scavenger hunt and for a great meal prepared by the leaders of the NCGO. There must have been about 180 people present. We had great food and fun. Just as we sat down to eat the sun came out to stay. On our way home we stopped for a few more geocaches. One had eluded me once before. After reviewing the cache logs I deduced where the cache was. Check out Can't Be a Cache, #2 (GC1NEN7). We made it back to High Point where we about had to hose down our grandson to clean him up after he played a game of tag in the mud. He had a blast! Geocaching events are great!