Billsville - aka Williamsburg

After downloading coordinates into our GPS, we were off "early" on Saturday - (early for us, it was actually after 9:30am when we departed) for some geocaching and a visit to Williamsburg. Our first cache was off the beaten track enroute. It was on a nice little eco-trail that wandered through the woods next to a swamp-like river and some of the trees were identified. That's what I like about geocaching. You not only get exercise and find caches, but you often learn something as well.

The actual main purpose of our trip was to scope out the place where Carol's mom will be staying next week. It is a condo-timeshare and Carol wanted to make sure to find the grocery store, routes to historical downtown, get there by the quickest route from the airport, etc. Basically a "dry run".

Our drive from Urbanna to Williamsburg took us through West Point. We never saw the academy, but now we know where West Point is located....on the York River. One of our caches there was what they call an Earthcache. You have to take a picture of yourself in front of the coordinates, then answer a bunch of questions. We were at the confluence of two rivers (Mattaponi & Pamunkey) at a spot where the water forms an estuary. There are several types of estuaries - COASTAL, delta, bar, fjord. I've probably missed some, but you get the point. Also, we had to determine what type of water was here. Choices were salt water, fresh water or BRACKISH water. (Correct answers are capitalized).


Here I am standing with my GPS with the water in the background. This photo (with water @ correct coordinates) was a requirement to log this as a "find". We were suppose to have thunderstorms and rain yesterday, but the rain held off until we were back home.


This is another cache site. We are in front of a library, just outside the entrance to Colonial Williamsburg and at the edge of William & Mary College. We thought this was a unique piece of sculpture. (If you cannot tell, this is an old-fashioned book bag). Plus there was actually a cache hidden within.


Another sculpture. This one with Thomas Jefferson as he was writing the Declaration of Independence. This was a "puzzle cache". They gave us a question....something about "take his number and multiply it by eight, then count the words and what is the next word". Then we email the answer and log it as a FIND.


Here I am having a little conversation with "Tom". Oh, one of the funny things, we had several caches that mentioning that it was close to Billsville. We kept looking for a building, or section of the city...something that would say Billsville. Wasn't until we were home and I was logging the finds that it hit me. Bill is short for William and ville is a synonym for burg. Sometimes this game is very mental.

The title for this cache was Noise. The clue was "what sound doesn't belong here". As you can see in the background, I am standing to the side of the old courthouse, and kids are playing with a "pretend" guillotine. Well, right at the site where I am standing and listening, is a shaft leading to the Colonial Freeway that runs right underneath Colonial Williamsburg. They say it was built in the late 1920's. Amazing. To me, this was the most interesting tidbit we learned today.

It was late last night after I got everything downloaded. And we had lousy internet service too, so I chose to blog early Sunday thinking that we would sleep in. But noooooooo, Carol found a whole bunch more caches and we are heading north and northeast today. But she "only" found 7 caches today.

We had lots of rain last night. I must have been tired because I heard not a thing. Our plan was to get up and take a little walk around the neighborhood today, but it will probably have to wait a few hours.

Carol starts her summer "job" tomorrow (she thinks). I only have three days left before I head home. So we are going to try to make the most of Sunday, Monday & Tuesday.

Now it is off to the showers and to get ready for another day in the Virginia woods.