A Doctor's Prescription to Geocache!!!!

A beautiful pasture near a cache called "Yes. We've Got Cows"

Great Falls Mill

The sign says it all

My mother-in-law's side of the family held its annual family reunion in November and we were able to attend. This afforded the opportunity to hit some caches on the way down to the small town of McFarlan, NC. Since being put on blood thinners I've been told to go no longer than an hour at a time in the car before getting out to walk. I was very pleased to hear that. Imagine, a doctor's prescription to get out and walk around ..... read..... geocache. Thanks to my wife who loves me we were able to head out for McFarlan early on a Saturday morning. Heading out of our High Point, NC is someone's version of the E.T. Highway. Of course the original Extraterrestrial Highway is in south central Nevada. Thanks to geocachers in the area it is a 98 mile long power trail with caches galore. In our case all the caches are easy park and grabs and they all start with words beginning in E and T. We picked our E.T. Highway clean! Once this was done we drove uninterrupted for an hour to get to Rockingham, the first major city along our route. I was drawn to a cache there that focused on a piece of Rockingham history. We pulled up and easily found Great Falls Mill (GC1RJ8P). The find was easy. The view of the ruins of the old cotton mill were fantastic. According to locals the mill, originally called the Richmond Manufacturing Company, was burned as Union General W.T. Sherman in the last days of the Civil War. For a historian, this is one of those caches you appreciate geocaching for bringing you to the location. Apparently a new mill was built in 1869. The ruins I was looking at today were from the 1972 fire that destroyed the vacant buildings. Nonetheless, it is impressive. Impressive enough that the group Hootie and the Blowfish filmed their video, "The Old Man and Me" at this location. Check it out.

The reunion was fun. It was great seeing the folks there. When we finished we drove half a mile to the North Carolina/South Carolina to find another park and grab entitled, IS IT NC OR SC? (GC2RB4X). We enjoyed the weekend with family and friends. To top it all off, with the doctor's blessings I was able to justify getting out of the car numerous times to find those easy park and grabs and to make up for lost time when I couldn't geocache during my recuperation.