Well, I did it again!
After Saturday’s hike with my wife, my daughter showed interest in joining us on the next one. She hasn’t really been the ‘outdoors’ type, so I wanted to find a smoother trail and it’s been a long time since I’ve been around this area, in the woods. I wasn’t really sure what to expect.
First on the list of mandatory finds was water. Something for Laura to snap a few photos of. She’s becoming quite the photo bug.
I was familiar with White Clay Creek State Park. Many years ago I’d walked this area quite a bit for photos, when I was more into photography. One day I’ll come back here and link those photos up. In any case, the Mason-Dixon Trail to Penndel Trail was what I found to be on the shorter side, and the easier side, just in case things went south and we needed to exit back to the car.
Gear Prep
Most of my gear was still packed and ready to go from our Saturday Trip.
I brought mostly the same ham radio gear as the previous trip and packing for this next trip mostly involved getting her ready to go. Being related to my wife, she’s also a beacon for mosquitoes, so we needed to get her prepped and being related to me she’s prone to tripping, so boots were a must. Back to Cabela’s we went!
Boots in hand we headed out to the park.
Getting our trail on.
Getting parked and paying the $5 (Delaware State Resident) fee was easy enough. Delaware doesn’t have digital pay stations at most of these parks, so be sure to bring some cash if you find some of these smaller trails.
We got ready and set out on the trail.
This trail mostly winds along the creek with plenty of wildlife and water! Including some ‘rapids’, if you can call them that. It’s nothing like Colorado or other places in the world but it’s peaceful to observe at the very least.
We hiked a bit more into the trail and came upon a beach of sorts along the creek. A few people were hanging out on the beach but otherwise it was an open area.
I briefly considered deploying my antenna along the creek here and hanging out on the beach to do my activation. Being a little bit of an introvert, I prefer to be away from people when activating. Those “what is that weird guy doing” looks don’t help me decode CW at all, and if you’ve worked me, you know I need all the help I can get!
In hindsight my second choice was actually worse.
Just up the bank, there was an open area to the side of the trail. I decided to deploy my antenna in this area and take the time to park myself on my stool to complete my activation.
Looking around, I realized I was indeed in a low area with higher elevation all around, so I decided to jump on 40 meters immediately.
After getting started and calling CQ a few times, I started getting responses and they just kept coming. Within about 20 minutes I had 12 contacts and completed the activation.
On this trip, I worked: MA, VA, PA, NC, MI, NJ, ME
ME is the only really question mark for me. I heard “ME” solidly but the callsign comes back in VA, maybe he’s on vacation! Either way, it has been logged.
One thing of note, I seem to be holding my key in a weird way and breaking the contacts in my cable. This is the second time this has happened and something I need to play with. To those hunters that heard a whole bunch of weird CW, I do apologize. I’m still very new to CW and hardware issues tend to get the better of me!
Back on the trail!
We quickly got packed up and back on the trail. Walking back the way we came.
We’d previously gone off trail to follow the creek a bit more, and I knew our trail looped back to the parking lot a ways back.
It was at this point I realized: I messed up again.
We’d hiked across the state line, into yet another park. US-6433. We set out to hike/activate US-1743.
So my lesson learned today is I really need to do more research and know which park I’m actually in when doing an activation. I hadn’t seen that post on the way in.
Looking at all trails, I see it plain as day that the majority of our time was actually spent in PA.
GeoCache
As we continued our hike, we reached the point where our original trail turns to loop back toward the parking lot. We discussed continuing the full trail or just going straight back to the car. The 3 of us decided to continue onward and see what there was to see!
It was at this time that I remembered GeoCaching and now having cellular service, I quickly downloaded the app.
I should note that this was all done in haste, so of the 30 geocaching apps in the app store, did I even grab the right one?
We set out to find our first cache.
We walked along the trail and identified that the cache was just on the other side of a low area (probably a creek at some point) along the opposite trail.
We crossed the low area, and Laura began looking for the cache.
She walked straight up to this tree trunk and said she thought it might be in there. She then saw the spider webs and decided not to look further.
After a few more moments of searching around, I clicked the hint button in the app: it’s in a rotten tree stump! Laura was right on it!
So we found our first cache, logged it in the app and wrote our name in the logbook.
Both Lauren and Laura were surprised and had never heard of geocaching! Both excited and looking forward to future exploration.
I think Geocaching might be a good way for them both to have their own “thing” to make the hike even more exciting. So I’ve got radio, they’ve got caches, and we can all enjoy our time together outdoors.
That said, I do have one word of caution for those parents geocaching out there. Political opinions aside, there are those out there intent on harming children, and this cache certainly contained an item that should NOT be presented to kids. This is a family friendly site, so I’ll leave it at that. If you’re a parent, you should probably look at what’s in the cache and what people are showing your kids!
All in all
A great afternoon out with the family, a decent activation, and a possible new hobby for my daughter.
Something I’ve come to learn: this is far more interesting than driving to a park!