Since I had to come down here, there was a cache or two I wanted to grab. Am I glad I did;
My log from Bird's Eye View.
THIS CACHE WAS MISSING! Read on.
As we pulled up, we figured "no problem, kind of obvious the few hiding places. 10 minutes later, not luck. We were behind the tree line from the road when a green Jeep pulled slowly past our geo-truck. It then stopped. Busted!
We made our way toward the end of the treeline when the jeep owner yelled out "Problem?". "No, just on on sort of a treasure hunting game. For some reason having a problem finding the object, it must be missing." we said. "It is." he replied. "Oh, your a cacher?" "No but what your looking for is back in my truck. I cleaned up all the garbage around here the other day and found it. Couldn't figure out what the heck it was, but kept it. It's in my tool box if you want to follow me back."
We followed hum back ta block or so south to his house. A house I had noticed on the way in because it was ver reminiscent of the property Baloo grew up on in Wheaton when that area was considered rural. After we went to his truck and retrieve the piece, and Baloo explained what the game was all about, the conversation turned to his little farm. He introduced himself as Floyd.
We went into a real small shed where there were several chickens. Now, we're no experts, but he said these were some sort of special breed he was cross breeding that resulted in smaller chickens that laid relatively large eggs for their size. There were about 17 chicks in the one coup he was obviously very proud of. He also showed us how he used golf balls as "nesting eggs".
As we made our way back to the driveway, Baloo in total awe, salivating over the property, the conversation turned to the cache and it's property. When asked if he minded the cache being there, he replied no. His issue is how the property is being treated. We got a short history.
It turns out that this property is an old graveyard dating to at least the early 1800's. Floyd said that sometime in the past couple decades, someone came in and buried the headstones about 4 to eight inches. It turns out that there was a church across the road to the south, hence the graveyard. In the late 1800s, there was a young pastor who cam to work at the church. When he died, he was buried in the graveyard. Many years later, his wife came back and had the body exhumed and moved to parts unknown.
He also said there were a few civil war veterans there. He mentioned that in a couple places to the south, four corners is what we remember him saying as one of them, there is also a similar graveyard in disrepair where he said he has found several coins dating back to around the time of the civil war. Apparently through the years, he has also found several arrowheads, which last month he finally had someone from one of the schools, NIU we presume, come over to look at and took some to evaluate that he is hopeful will prove to have some additional history to add to the area.
We even found out he has a daughter in the banking business up by us in the De Kalb area. We left with an invitation to stop in and visit any time we were into the area. We're betting that invitation goes for all of our extended geo-family.
We took the cache back to it's spot, signed the log and based on the hint and what Floyd had told us where he found it, replaced it.
Driving away we were reminded of cross country motorcycle trips we used to take where we would only travel "blue roads" to meet people in small towns like Floyd and, in fact, those trips are why we bought our first GPSr. We got into geocaching to use our GPSr to discover new areas, glad to see we can use it to discover interesting locals as well.
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