GEOCACHING--
The Adventure Continues

These photos were taken in Vinton County Ohio where Sue and I centered a geocaching outing in a long abandoned town featuring an also abandoned cemetery and a pair of sometimes scary railroad tunnels.

The story started when I read of the place in the book, Weird Ohio by Willis, Henderson and Coleman.  She agreed it sounded like fun and away we went.  After a lunch meeting with her sister Patsy Love in Newark we headed south and experienced an Earth Cache named Waters of Life near Buckeye Lake.

Then it was on to finding some conventional caches in and around the ladies' hometown of Junction City where Patsy still lives on the family homestead.  One of those caches featured Phil Sheridan who played a significant role in the Civil War and who was born in nearby Somerset.

After an overnight rest it was on to Moonville in northeastern Vinton County.  That story will follow next Saturday.  Meanwhile, these photos were taken near the abandoned town of Moonville where we thought we had found one of the three caches we were seeking.  The one in the top photo was at Moonville Rocks where Sue had to climb up the rock formation to retrieve the shiny cylinder she is holding in the smaller photo.

Turns out the cylinder was not a geocache.  It was a finely machined salt and pepper shaker; the kind favored by hikers, one of whom must have stopped by this rocky perch for lunch then left his nifty and likely expensive gadget behind.  We left it there too.

In the lower photo Sue is examining the only cache we found of the three we we were seeking at the location of this abandoned town.  This cache was a weather proof food container, wrapped in camouflage tape and well hidden in the end of the hollow log in front of her at the edge of the town's also abandoned cemetery.

We were thwarted in finding a cache in the Moonville tunnel (featured in next Saturday's story) because access to the tunnel required us to ford a robustly flowing stream which we could not do safely.

We did find 7 of the nine we were seeking; below our customary average but rewarding nonetheless.