A Night in the Cemetery - the Adventure Begins!

What an adventure!  Last year Ratspazum (Steve and Mary) attended a Halloween geocaching event in historic Cleveland, and they invited us to go with them this year.  Can you imagine?  Taking a moonlit walking tour by torchlight and then geocaching in a historic cemetery the week of Halloween? Well, if you’re going to make a trip in that direction, you might as well make it a geocaching excursion!

Our tourguide in the Moses Mausoleum
East Cleveland Township Cemetery

So, Saturday morning myself, TaGeez and Mr. & Mrs. Ratspazum loaded up the car and headed to the ECTC: A Night in the Cemetery event GC5BQ4D.  Our focus on the Autumn adventure included Virtuals, Earth Caches, webcams, highly-favorited caches, cemetery caches and JASMER-fillers while glorying in these brilliant Fall colors. Ohio and Pennsylvania are ablaze with the most amazing colors right now!

Instead of inundating this post with hundreds of pics (I took 641, in fact), I thought I’d share our adventure over several posts.  To begin, I had to share one of the highpoints of the trip: we found a September 2000 cache near Erie, PA! I only have 4 more for my JASMER grid!

TaGeez and Scrapcat

The sign said “wear hunter orange”.  Instead, we wore bumblebee yellow, moose brown, forest evergreen and bear black.  And, yes, there was a lot of gunfire in the distance!

Our adventure by the numbers:

• 750 miles with 3 great friends (and a dragon in a toga) traversing the width of 2 states: Ohio and Pennsylvania
• 53 caches including 2 webcams, 3 Earth Caches, 4 Virtuals & 4 Letterboxes plus 27 cemeteries (with MANY zinc headstones)
• Visited a stupendous historic cemetery (Lakeview Cemetery) and night cached/toured in a smaller historic cemetery nearby (ECTC), all off Cleveland's Euclid Avenue (formerly "Millionaire's Road")
• 1 JASMER cache from Sept 2000. 
• 1 Presidential mausoleum with 1 Presidential casket, 1 dam, 1 castle, 1 viaduct, 1 amazing series of waterfalls, several lighthouses, 11 pieces of art constructed out of disused auto parts, and about a dozen "Beetle people"
• Completed our best "Busy Day" with 8 cache types: traditional, Earth, Letterbox, Wherigo, puzzle, webcam, Multi and Virtual
• Added 1 new state souvenir: Pennsylvania
• Dropped 10 TB's and lost one of mine (my "Virtual" Geocoin is now a "Virtual Geocoin" lost at a Virtual)
• Attracted 5 ticks (they were fickle… only attracted to men named “Steve”)