What is an adventure?  Does adventure lie in the destination?  Can you truly plan an adventure?  Or is planning the counter-intuitive anti-adventure?  Many people subscribe to the the cliched, yet true, “it’s about the journey not the destination” mindset.  To me the best adventures occur happen when random chance crashes into good planning and ends with a smile and a great story.  Right now I’m planning something that may be my next great adventure.

What could very well be my next great adventure will take place right here in Charlotte.  No need to travel to a different state and risk the need of new tires or worry about getting snatched up by some hill billy.  There will be no ocean sunsets as the day ends and dark runs through alligator alley and swarms of bugs that splatter against your shield so thick you can’t see.  No late night searching for a hotel in a strange area on a holiday weekend.  None of the normal things I’ve become accustomed to on my travels.  Although there is no telling what I’ll find on this upcoming adventure.

I’m planning on doing my first 5/5 (difficulty/terrain) geocache, “The lost treasure of the confederacy”  Only the toughest caches in the world have this rating.  Some of them involves scuba diving, or mountain climbing, or just crazy crazy stuff I’ve only read about and never even come close to accomplishing.  But for my quickly approaching milestone of 1000 caches found I’m going to attempt to do the closest one.

From what I can gather from reading the description and the logs on the cache this will not be easy at all.  It involves knee high or higher water.  Crawling through pipes and tubes all over the Queens City, paying attention to detail, and solving puzzles along the way.  The quickest anyone has done this cache is 14 hours, which is fine by me.  I’m not setting out to make any time record on this.  Actually I may be looking to spread it over at least two weekends.  Just depending on how well it goes.

The best part about this cache is that it is based on some history.  It appears that the “Lost gold of the confederacy” is a known legend/myth/historical story/fact?  Maybe people that grew up in the south know of this, but being a Yankee myself I had never heard of it.  But after reading a few resources I realized that the gold is indeed true.  People were even tortured over it.  While I obviously won’t be looking for the actual gold the story is a good read and fun to imagine just stumbling across it on my way.

If you get a second check out the gallery of images that kind me a clue of what I may be getting into.  Anyone wanna tag along?