Went out to Chatham after work (actually, I had dinner first but I was still quite early for the sunset) to join a group of geocachers going for the Night Sweats geocache. It's not far from the Short Hills Mall and the entry point is in a residential area. Anyway, on my drive there it was raining just a little so I thought conditions would be bad. But the rain stopped and the weather was surprisingly cooperative for the duration that everyone was there. When I got to the entry point, 4 geocachers who had already completed the other cache in the same location were waiting for everyone else to show up. As we waited, more and more folks arrived until there were about a dozen of us. I'm sure the neighbors were wondering what a group of people were doing parking at a dead-end road and hanging out there but they didn't call the cops.
Once it got to around 8pm, we went through the woods to the starting point. It's an unusual location. Apparently, this was a connecting road and an intersection with Route 24 that was never completed. The bridge is there and parts of the cloverleaf ramps too but in both directions, the road leads to nowhere. Supposedly, the Eisenhower Parkway is supposed to go through this area but that was never completed as part of the land is the Newark Watershed and therefore not open for development.
When it got dark enough, we began to see the reflectors. There were lots of decoys though going in a bunch of wrong directions so small groups of us split up and walked around. I think I was in the second (or maybe the third?) group to find it but what really happened was dhenning found it and I found him. :) We logged in and replaced the cache quietly and snuck off to the side and out of the woods so that others may search for it. Then one by one, the other groups all found the cache and snuck out of the woods.
As we were walking back out, someone saw a bag of meat on top of the overpass. Now that was bizarre. There was also some graffiti on the overpass that wasn't your typical graffiti. One was a drawing of a butterfly and another looked like an iPod with circular sound waves coming out of it.
Pictures:
- Waiting at the entry point
- On the way to the starting point
- Hanging around in the dark after finding the cache
- Back out at the residential area to resume our loitering :)
