Charlotte, North Carolina

June 21 – 24, 2022

Mostly our visit to Charlotte was about geocaching, but Jane took the opportunity to meet up with a very good friend she knew in Fort Pierce. Marlowe Weingart lives in Asheville and Jane and Marlowe met in Morganton about halfway between their locations. Who remembered to get a photo? Here’s an old one–from a visit to the American Orchid Society greenhouse in West Palm Beach in 2008.

Jane did find a geocache while in Morganton, but she really had to work for it. You might think an 18-inch container would be easy to find in a corner garden–that ground cover is not that tall–but this find took over half an hour.

The birthplace of President James K. Polk has been reconstructed in Pineville, NC. Polk served only one term, but during those four years four states were admitted to the Union (Florida, Texas, Iowa and Wisconsin), the War with Mexico was begun and ended, the postage stamp was authorized, and gold was discovered in California.

North Carolina’s oldest geocache, a multi-cache in two parts, proved to be a real stumper for us. The cache owner gave a location and said that information needed for the final location would be found there. The cache description provided nine words associated with possible final locations. We went so far as to put all nine of them on a map, but had no way to know which to try first. All we saw at the initial coordinates was a sign warning bicyclists to give an audible warning when approaching pedestrians. The proverbial light went on when we read the clue that challenged us to find the missing word in a list. The initials of words in that list spelled “pick bell” and bell was one of the words associated with locations. And, we realized, a bell is one way bicyclists can warn pedestrians.

Even though we then knew the coordinates of the final location, our difficulties weren’t over. There didn’t appear to be a path to those coordinates. We read other people’s logs and saw that someone had taken a less-used path. About 500 feet later, we had the cache in hand.