That would be to drive over the Kerr Dam that is responsible for this wonderful reservoir we've been enjoying for the last five days.
Most of today's 170+ mile route is on Interstate Highways. Once we reached the terminus of I-85 in Hillsborough, NC we merged onto I-40 to head West for a little while.
We would soon find ourselves once again on I-85 to bypass around the city of Greensboro, NC before merging onto I-73 to make some more miles in a southernly direction.
I-73 eventually merges with I-74 which we were on for less than 10-miles before we finally left the Interstates behind with a little less than 30-miles to go to reach our destination.
If you haven't been keeping track, which I totally understand if you haven't, that's four different Interstates we drove to zig and zag our way through North Carolina today.
In theory, we could have saved a few miles if we traveled along some of the backroads, but it would have taken us longer to to travel that shorter distance.
The reason I qualified that statement with "in theory" is because that takes into account that the traffic moves faster on the Interstates. That's usually true, but one short 5-mile section of I-40 outside of Greensboro took us 45-minutes to get through.
There was a "bad" accident which had 2 of the 3-lanes on the Interstate shutdown and didn't look like they would be reopening it anytime today.
We intentionally left the campsite late today, shortly after noon, because we can't check in on our next campsite until 4:00PM. It was supposed to be a 3-hour commute, but thanks to the accident it was closer to 4-hours, which would have been fine.
Also factor in that we almost never travel at the posted speed limit when it's over 55MPH which added another 30-minutes to our travel time.
With the time change it gets dark an hour earlier now and we never want to arrive after dark to a campground.
We made it to campground with maybe an hour of daylight left, plenty of time for us to locate our campsite, back in THE POD and get set up.
Our next adventure began when we pulled up in front of our "reserved campsite" and a trailer with Alaska license tags was already occupying the site. There was no tow vehicle on the site, so I figured even if I did knock on the door no one would answer.
We had reserved Campsite #15 and this whole 50-site campground is one big one-way loop, so we had no choice but to continue on back to the Camp Host site we saw on the way in.
The Camp Host is on Site #6 and of course with the way our luck has been going today, when we get back to his site there's now no one there, unlike when we passed by just 10-minutes earlier.
It's Tuesday and the campground is less than half full, so it was decided we would occupy a vacant site within view of the camphost's site. Just as we were preparing to back into Site #10 a truck pulled up behind us and the driver got out.
I got out to meet with him, hoping it was the Camp Host, which is was. He said, "I'll bet you're the Kelley's and you're wondering why someone is occupying your site".
He went on to explain how the Alaska people arrived after dark the day before and that he explained they could only be on the site they chose for one night, because it was reserved for the next three nights starting tomorrow.
The next morning, when the Camp Host was making his rounds of the campsites, there was no one to be found on the Site #15. Their chairs are setup around the fire pit, their BBQ is out on the table, their electic cord is still plugged in and other items are outside the trailer. They obviously are not planning to move today.
All day long he's been expecting them to return, but it's now after 5:00PM and the sun is going down. He offered to allow us to use Site #31, which is held back from the reservation sites for just this situation.
He explained Site #31 is one of the "best sites" in the campground, used to pacify angry campers when they are displaced. He described it as large, flat and has some of the best cell phone reception in the campground, thanks to it being higher up in the forest than most of the other sites.
Just to mess with him I asked, "Is that your best offer"? He slowly nodded and I cheerily said, "Then we'll take it"!
The 8.359 mi² and 190' deep Badin Lake was created in 1917 with the damming of the Yadkin-Pee Dee River.
We've now been to 49 states (we haven't been to Hawai'i, yet!) and I have indeed found one Geocache in every state that we've visited.
There are only a few requirements to qualify as a find, like it must be somewhere that has cell phone reception, because I use the Geocaching.com app on my iPhone to do the search.
It must be close to somewhere that we have camped, so no pulling over on the Interstate and logging a find in the rest area parking lot.
Finally, and this will be contested by some Geocache "professionals" (RW, you know who you are), I only need to have the cache in my hands to qualify as a find. I don't need to open the cache and sign a logbook like most other Geocachers do.
After looking at my statistics on Geocaching.com I noticed that 17 of my 49 finds are no longer active caches. They're either listed as Archived or Disabled, either way I'm not going to count them as finds anymore.
So now I have 18 Geocaches to find around the country and I'm going to start "fixing" that situation today. Just ¼-mile down the hiking trail from the campground is where I found my "replacement cache" for North Carolina.
FYI - One of those Archived caches was the one I found in Alaska, you know what that means!
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