Hey welcome home matey!!!!! Looking forward to you posting some great pics from down under.
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Hey welcome home matey!!!!! Looking forward to you posting some great pics from down under.
I wouldn't worry too much about geocachers . . . most seem to be pretty respectful . . . and personally I love checking out old cemeteries . . . I find them quite peaceful.
In fact, after college I lived in a camp that was right next to a cemetery . . . well technically it was in the cemetery. True story. It seems as though my grandparents had built a camp a number of years back and for whatever reason my grandfather decided to move it right into the small family cemetery -- not over any graves (I assume), but within the maples lining the cemetery.
It was a bit odd since Heidi would hang laundry out back in the graveyard and actually used one of the headstones to "hold" on to her laundrybasket -- apparently she even made sure to thank the fella for lending her a hand. To this day she still remembers the family's names.
Over time the coffins had apparently decayed since you could see the depressions in the earth and once in a while a bone or two would pop up. I didn't think too much about this since it was a common enough occurence. However, one time an oil/propane technician was installing a propane line for us when one of our cats ran by with a human bone in its mouth (this is according to my wife Heidi who is a nurse -- she worked on an orthopedic floor once so she knows her bones) and kind of freaked out the guy.
Now that we officially own the area and the cemetery I hope to move the camp and fix up the cemetery so that it's a little more respectful to the family buried there . . .
I've got my own Vermont story as well . . . but nowhere near as freaky as Maniac's grave-digging zombie story.
I could entitle my little story . . . Vermont Hates Me . . . or maybe Emma, Where Did You Say You Lived Again? (inside joke that Hiram and Medawisla will understand) . . . or maybe even No Room At the Inn.
Now first off I have to tell you that about five or six years ago Heidi and I first traveled to Vermont and the first night there we stopped at one of the first hotels we came to in the Town of Woodstock. We stopped here since we were both very, very tired from working all day and traveling a good portion of the evening. I should have been clued in to a possible problem when the clerk asked if I wanted to see the room -- something that no one has ever asked me before or since then. However, I figured a room is a room -- I have low standards. I only want to sleep there and take a shower . . . I don't care if it doesn't have a whirlpool tub, mints on the pillows, etc.
That was my first mistake . . . we took the room since we were wicked tired, but I can tell you that neither Heidi or I got much sleep. First off, the room was a mess -- tiles were missing in the bathroom ceiling even. It probably won't surprise you to learn that the carpet was vintage 1974 burnt sienna shag orange. The strangest thing was to find cat litter under the bed -- I'm still not sure to this day if it was to try to combat the odor or if it was for the cat employed to kill the mice in the walls which we heard all night long (apparently this was the cat's night off since we never saw it.)
Since then, I have always tried to get a hotel rated by AAA unless I'm in a real pinch and now I always try to find a hotel before I'm totally exhausted so I can get a different hotel room if I ever find myself in a dive like that one.
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And so this brings us to present day . . . or more specifically to last Friday-Saturday.
In retrospect I probably should have reserved a room (although as some of you know from my ranting about the Crown Park Inn in Caribou a year or so ago, reservations don't mean squat) . . . and I should have been clued in to a possible problem when we had to go to four hotels in Rutland before finding a room at a decent price, but then again I wouldn't have this tale to tell you if I had done so.
We stayed the night in Rutland after a very nice visit of Calvin Coolidge's boyhood home in Plymouth Notch. We then journeyed south to the Wilson Castle (very nice), Hubbardton Battlefield (not very spectacular) and Fort Ticonderoga (OK, but not great) before looking for a hotel room in Shelburne . . . and then Burlington. We quickly discovered however after I checked at hotel after hotel that there was nothing available -- apparently this was due to the convergence of leaf peepers (including tour buses) coming up from the south, those darn Canadians coming south for Thanksgiving and taking advantage of the cheap American dollar, a large wedding and UVM's Parent's Weekend.
After driving all over Burlington and finding nothing available we took one hotel's advice and drove 45 minutes north to St. Albans . . . only to find once again no rooms were available. At this point we decided to head east and check for room availability as we went . . . finally after many stops and seeing "no vacancy" over and over again I stopped at one hotel where the clerk said she had called a bunch of hotels within a 30 minute distance and there were no rooms . . . she added that one group from Montreal had given up and were heading home . . . and that it seemed as though there was nothing available in that area of Vermont or New Hampshire.
With that news Heidi and I made the decision to head home with the intention of possibly staying in the White Mountains if we found a vacancy . . . but alas it was not meant to be. Nine hours after starting our search we crawled into our own bed around 2 a.m. . . . and I have since made a resolution . . . I'm not going back to Vermont anytime soon -- or I'll at least make a reservation several weeks ahead of time and hope that the hotel doesn't run things like the Crown Park Inn in Caribou.;) :D
That is really spooky....I seem to recall another story similar to this one that happened a couple yers ago to another geocacher in VT. I wonder if its the same cache involved. The authorities got involved in that one too. What is the name of the cache Mainiac? Well I hope they find out who the vandals are. With Halloween coming up you almost have to wonder if its just a prank in poor taste...:eek:
If I had been me, I'm sure it would put a damper on my caching. I'm glad you were still able to continue on with your vacation.
Had the pleasure of bumping into Jake and Heidi (yes in the flesh - not that photo in his wallet that everyone wonders about)....at Ocean State Job Lots (I didn't see any LocNLocs in his basket or those fake rats either) in Belfast on Monday. We had a great chat and he related his horror story of the Trip!
It was interesting as I traveled through Rangely over the weekend at the number of folks on the road - loads of them. It passed through my mind I might be lucky I didn't need a room and was staying at a friend's home for the weekend. On my way back up East on Rt 1 the line of traffic southbound going into Wiscasset was over 3 miles long waiting to cross the bridge.
Lesson learned - holidays and peak seasons - prepare ahead. But Jake and Heidi could have stayed in their 4 Runner at Walmart if they had really objected to driving home.
As for the grave yard - a number of years ago the step-grandsons were mowing in our town Settler's cemetery. The mower hit metel. It was a casket tag off a casket. A metal engraved tag with information about the person in the casket. The weird thing was that the tag and the data on the gravestone did not match exactly. Wonder which one is really right?