Talk:Crestview, Florida

6/29/08 - The inaugural Geo-hash trip. There was finally a location that occurred (1) on a weekend and (2) in a place that was accessible. Liberian and Power Tool made the trip and reached the location. It was raining (sort of like the quintessential Hemingway novel). We also took in the "Plastic Town" geocache and found the "PT 36" survey benchmark while we were out there.

Prediction: Dateline Sunday, July 13, 2008: Today's destination appears to be quite easily reachable. Liberian will try to be there at 4:00 PM.

The event: 7/13/08 - Liberian made the trip out Highway 20 to the nearest Eglin range road that led in the right direction. Around 4:00 the heavens opened and the rain poured down, with much thunder and lightning. "Quite easily reachable" was in terms of being on legally-accessible land, not being out in the Gulf, and not being too far from the road. Unfortunately, what Google Maps said was 1000 feet of mostly-open terrain turned out to be a third of a mile of scrub woods of varying thickness. Part of the route had been recently burned and so the underbrush was more open. Even so, Liberian was only able to get within about 150 feet of the location before turning back. On the way back he picked up a few old survey benchmarks (one of them at the entrance to the range road).

7/31/08 - This was a weekday geohash, very close to Niceville, and only about a hundred feet from the nearest paved road. I regret the missed opportunity.

8/10/08 - Today's meetup location was in the Blackwater State Forest, on a back road north of Holt. The Not-So-Wild Bunch, made up of Natural Beauty, Power Tool, Kitsune, and Liberian drove up to the Bone Creek Recreation Area and parked. Unfortunately Liberian had forgotten the detailed maps and so the NSWB took off in a more-or-less straight line towards the meetup location. After a quarter of a mile of winding in and out of forest, we made it to the appropriate point and took some pictures. (When Liberian gets his act together, he will get pictures of everybody present, along with something showing the latitude and longitude and date and time. And he won't hold his finger over the latitude readout of the GPS unit.) We then walked out along the road--a much easier route than the way in. On the way up we visited a geocache; on the way home we visited four more.