Main Journal Entry #006

     I showed this picture to my friend Owen (he is from London) and he asked, "Is this what Christmas in America is like?"
     I don't talk to him anymore.  He doesn't geocache anyway.

     This is a statue called Frustration.  The sculpture represents the hostages from the Iran hostage crisis, and as such it has been used as a clue in a whimsical GPS-based game of hide-and-seek.  Nothing is hidden on it, but you needed information from it to complete a multicache at this park.  It is part of a growing mental catalog I keep of creepy-ass sculptures that seem to dot the area.

     After reading a bit on my phone, it occurred to me that in the course of geocaching, people will lead you around and have you acquire such random information for their puzzles.  That is what I thought the theme would be for Entry #006, but my thoughts and opinions on pointless stuff ended up dominating the final edit.

     The first cache in the video, Dance a Jig, makes excellent use of a virtual jigsaw puzzle, and I thoroughly hated all 52 minutes of putting it together to get the coords.  It did make me feel more accomplished when I found the cache, so maybe really, really minor adversity can build character!  That cache and half a dozen others (including Under The Boardwalk and Vets Park Never Forget) were located in Veterans Park in New Jersey.

     Where I had the most jollies was at Pioneer Day Passageway, and if you are a Mormon, please let me know as I have some questions for you.  Anyway, there is whole separate post for that cache.  A most enjoyable location.  The same goes for Delhaas A Wall.  They are the entries right before this one.

     I just looked in to the whole mule-thing from Shadowy Span.    It turns out that, for some reason, a bunch of private investors spent about $90,000 to "place 300 decorated fiberglass mules along the 165-mile canal corridor next spring, from Wilkes Barre to Bristol, which includes the Delaware Canal State Park." source.  It is called the Miles of Mules.
     Now, this was well over a decade ago, and in fact I know I have seen at least two more in my travels.  Apparently some were moved, some destroyed, some auctioned, etc...
     According to this website which has pictures of known-locations for mules, our pal by the cache is called Salvaged and not, as I had hoped, Cenobite.  Regardless, I think I have a new sub-quest.  I also think I know where one mule is that has not been listed for a decade!

     And here I was thinking geocaching was pretty weird...

PLEASE NOTE:  In an effort to not be a total Spoiler Man, I am no longer linking the cache names with their respective geocache.com listing, nor tagging by name on the YouTube videos.  If I want to find 10k caches, I best not make too many enemies!