[Team Honeybunnies]

Congrats guys! Look forward to seeing you again soon.

[Team Honeybunnies]

Yep, we’re still hoping to see this one together, but we will have to see. Changes in both of our lifestyles will make this one a challenge right up to the end. Still working at it though. We’ll keep everyone informed. It would be fun to share it with others.

We’ve had some long discussions about what cache to pick. A long walk seems mandatory, the clunk of an ammo can a bonus, probably a traditional. There are some great candidates, but we seem to lack the full-day walk type of cache in Wisconsin. Suggestions?

[Team Honeybunnies]

We’re flattered that you chose one of ours to pass your milestone Dan, and my favorite cache hidden to boot. I wish more people would visit Ziba Burns’ marker. Still haven’t gotten the log notification from Groundspeak interestingly enough…

[Team Honeybunnies]

@labrat_wr wrote:

thinking about a cache that the finders are to post only

TFTC

on their log and deleting anything else by saying I don’t care how much fun you had, how long you searched, that you didn’t like the cache, if you left anything, took anything, whatever. (and no punctuation, emoticons, etc)

How can I word this so it doesn’t appear as an ALR? 😀

Heh, heh. Did one like that somewhere, I think Western Minnesota. Also did one that was Star Trek themed. Found logs could only say “Scotty, beam me up!” DNFs could only say “Captain, I cannot change the laws of physics”.

[Team Honeybunnies]

Friday the 27th was a great big ‘ol fat rest day with nothing on the agenda but sun and fun. We spent the entire day in the Hot Springs area, and visited the National Park for most of the day. There’s a really nice EarthCache there, GC11WJ5 Tah-Ne-Co. Six stops, six pictures and ten questions for a total of four hours of effort and a few miles walked. It takes you to most all of the interesting spots in the park, including the Visitor’s Center in the Fordyce Bathhouse, a hot spring, a cold spring, the Mountain Tower, the Grand Promenade, and a nice long walk to an outcrop on the trails above town.

This culminated in another visit to McClards. Same waitress, Noah still flirting, same bones for me. Marie had the chopped pork. Here the style is to serve the cole slaw on top of the sandwich. Takes some adjustment, but just a different kind of tasty. Dessert, the first in days, was peach cobbler and vanilla ice cream. Two spoons of course, and Noah got his first taste of ice cream. Made a face at the cold then scarfed it down with gusto.

We headed back early, anticipating rain, checked email and discovered that majii had sent us the coords, so we dashed into Little Rock to a scenic suburban park and charged uphill for the final. W00t! I could rhapsodize for hours about how fun these are, but it’s all been said before. If anyone’s still interested in my opinion I’ll freely offer it in person. Took a much slower sunset walk back to the car, breathing the air and taking in all the green, contented.

[Team Honeybunnies]

The 26th was our last day of pages, needing four more to complete the Arkansas DeLorme. We started off with a dense fog advisory, but headed for one of the most scenic portions of the state thus far. We took our time and did quite a few caches along the Womble Auto Tour in the Oachita National Forest. This is pretty similar to our Nicolet Auto Tour, and the caches were in some very pretty areas, though the fog kept the vistas shrouded. We took one nicely long hike for GC1A083 Crystal Vista. The fog was hanging in the spiderwebs on the slopes and looked like low-lying clouds passing through the trees. Perfect. Another very nice cache roadside was GCHYVP Hernando’s Hide Away. This one was at a spring in a steep little valley with a rock wall and shelter built by the CCC.

Another cache of note was GCTMNQ Hung Man’s Cache. Way down a gravel country road there’s just a sign nailed to a tree and an obviously much more recent stainless marker noting where a man was lynched. Just the idea of this one took the warmth out of the spring air. For the most part these things are in our past, but man’s brutality toward his fellow man never ceases to amaze.

We quit fairly early, the long days losing their novelty,and headed back toward the Hot Springs area. Time for a bit of a pilgrimage. We went to McClard’s Barbeque for dinner, getting there right around the rush hour and enjoying the bustle of this American classic. Fans of good barbeque and/or the Food Network will probably know this place, as it gets a lot of attention on a lot of top 10 lists. Bill Clinton has been known to partake in his hometown’s best and celebrity photos line the walls. The storefront was also featured in the opening credits of Burt Reynolds’ comedy series Evening Shade.

It’s just a little place with formica counter, tables and booths, and a checkerboard tile floor, but wow. You can eat the ambiance here with a spoon. Noah flirted outrageously with the waitress and she sat down and played with him for a bit and chatted with us before bringing out a couple slabs of the good stuff. Pure heaven with a side of slaw and beans. No sweet tea though! Plenty of places in the south advertise that they have the best Coke in town though.

We took a leisurely drive back to the hotel and spent a quiet evening not moving, and getting those finds logged and contacting majii, the owner of the Challenge so he could get the coords to us.

[Team Honeybunnies]

@marc_54140 wrote:

What, Noah did not get to lick the sauce from your fingers?!

Noah got to try a tiny spoon of Dad’s sauce one night and did a little mincing thing with his mouth and bounced up and down a couple times. Little Mr. Man might not be ready for that yet…

[Team Honeybunnies]

Yah, okay, I’m in… 😉 . http://thb.mybrute.com

[Team Honeybunnies]

The 25th was a day of pretty unremarkable caches in the densely-pined south-central portion of the state. We had run into some vehicular trouble and had to have brake work done before getting a now-late start for the day. The heaviest rains of the trip hit us at the last several caches and into the evening, but thunderstorms are better than snowstorms in my mind.

We also dipped down into Louisiana to pick up our first LA caches.

Dinner was back to barbeque, as it should be 😉 . Fat Boy’s in Arkadelphia was the destination, and no frills, just good smoked pig. I had the bones, the missus had the brisket, and Noah had pureed chicken,rice and vegetables.

[Team Honeybunnies]

Congrats guys! What cache…?

[Team Honeybunnies]

Tuesday the 24th was an all-Delta day, beginning with a drive over to Helena, then down the river to Lake Chicot State Park.

First destination was Louisiana Purchase State Historic Park, site of the initial survey point for the entire Purchase. It’s in a headwater swamp, what I would call bayou, and has a boardwalk out the entire way to a stone marker commemorating the spot. The weather was forecast to be awful later, and we had incredible wind here, the trees clattering together on the walk. A couple snakes put in an appearance, swimming along, but they were camera-shy. We hoped to see an American Alligator, making a comeback in the area, but never had any luck.

Next was Helena, known for its Victorian homes,which it indeed had, but it also had some neighborhoods as threatening as any I’ve adventured through. Not where I wanted Noah, and we didn’t linger. We didn’t need to visit Helena for the page, and the big attraction for me was that General Patrick Ronayne Cleburne, CSA is buried there on a beautiful hilltop among his comrades. Cleburne was an Irish immigrant and pharmacist. When his adoptive state seceded he felt it was his obligation to enlist. He would earn the nickname “Stonewall of the West”, and is also remembered for his idea to arm the slaves in exchange for their freedom, still rejected at that stage of the war.

We continued south from here, stopping at Arkansas Post, first settled by the French in 1686, the oldest European settlement in the Mississippi valley, and the scene of Revolutionary and Civil War battles. Another beautiful place in what is now a backwater, and despite the choppy waters a couple egrets put in appearances.

Further south yet the winds got really epic, ahead of the storm finally arriving. The weather people were calling it a “significant weather event”. I’m not sure if that means “Holy crap! Batten the hatches!” or if it’s just another opportunity for ad revenue at the Weather Channel. Regardless it never got too spooky, despite driving home in driving rain.

[Team Honeybunnies]

Monday the 23rd we cleaned up the last of the pages north of I-40 in the morning, then headed for Mt. Magazine, the highest point in Arkansas for the afternoon. The apple, plum and cherry blossoms really added wisps of color as we drove along the south bank of the Arkansas River on the way there.

Even for another easy grab, one of the most memorable caches was GCZKV1 – Hippy Hill. A VW bus in psychedelic colors, and an ammo can where the engine once was. Groovy, baby. Groovy.

Another very nice one was GCR8FQ – Brides Vale Falls, not my spelling. This was a great little 40′ fall fed by a little creek, and the bed was shallow and flat enough that you could walk right along the lip, which made for some cool pictures. Kind of a neat hide too, you actually had to stand in the stream bed to find and retrieve it.

GC11X3P was a very old graveyard, and the first place we saw multiple Confederate veterans, from Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee and Mississippi, all cavalry. The whole cemetery was tall grass, and many of the graves were covered with big slabs of river stone, kind of crypt-like. We spotted a REALLY big snake slipping into one of these, but I wasn’t fast enough to get a good look, and while I have an admittedly foolish relationship with snakes, I don’t go poking either.

Dinner was at Cracker Barrel, not my first choice, but right next to the hotel. They do have boiled turnip greens though. Yum.

We had chosen to get a centrally located hotel outside of Little Rock and radiate out in spokes every day to see the state and get those all important pages. This worked well for this trip, as we still had some concerns about it being too cold for Noah (unfounded), and it meant not having to tear down the pack n’ play every morning. If all goes well we’ll be able to return to our tent camping ways this fall’s trip. Maybe Noah can make the campout.

[Team Honeybunnies]

Well, it’s no secret now that our Arkansas sojourn involved the DeLorme Challenge there, so a bit of detail about that. Sunday the 22nd was our most difficult day of the trip, logging the entire top row plus a couple others for a total of nine pages. We didn’t get back to the hotel until nearly midnight, and this was the only day of the trip that we resorted to fast food for sustenance. For all the rushing though, there were highlights.

We found a cache on the Cache River, somehow a must-do, no? This was in the northeast part of the state and in what I would call Delta country, though I don’t know the real boundaries of the region. Flat, flat, flat, but still pretty, more signs of greening everywhere. If the Ivory-billed woodpecker still exists, the Cache River is as good a place as any, just the views from the road being incredibly dense and overgrown.

We also did part of a power trail in the middle of kind of nowhere, doing 17 caches in about 45 minutes. A pretty little area, but not very satisfying in the end. The caches were all placed by caching members of a family to highlight their home town.

Gorilla Stash GC1B, is the oldest cache in Arkansas, and surprisingly an urban P’n’G. Noah chose to snooze at this time, so missed meeting Buttercup 😉 . Still a nice cache, in a very scenic town, Mountain Home. Hotdogs_off_trail can attest to that.

We hoped to make Eureka Springs based on recommendations from Zuma, but only made Berryville before finishing after sunset. This would be the only day where we truly bit off more than we could chew.

[Team Honeybunnies]

Hello again everyone. Well, I am regretful that I couldn’t keep up with the blog while on the road. Having to log finds in the evening took up what little energy I had left after dawn-to-past-dusk days 😳 . I’m going to post daily details in the spirit of the thing and hope it inspires others to share their journeys. Look forward to a string of posts recounting the days.

[Team Honeybunnies]

Congratulations Matt! Hope you enjoyed the Smokies. We had a really nice time camping in Cades Cove two years ago, and doing the same caches. A double kilo on the horizon?

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