29 August 2018 End of a Long Weekend

Our long weekend was ending today. We were planning to finish the qualifications for the Ohio Great 880 challenge and get home for dog pick-up from the sitters. We needed a number of finds in two counties and a long drive home. We started our day in Shelby County in the sleepy town of Lockington.

The small town hosts the remains of five locks which gave an almost seventy foot elevation rise along the Ohio and Erie Canal. The lock remains are mostly intact and make for an interesting visit. The geocache we searched made for a futile dnf. I didn't help by leaving my gps at the cache coordinates and needing to re-visit the site for the retrieval. The town

Locked one at the site was preserved a number of years ago.

The other locks are mostly intact and in remarkable condition for being over 170 year-old construction.

With little water in the late summer, they were an easy walk through.

As a small town, Lockington is dying. It has lost about 38% of its residents in the last twenty years dropping to 137. Eventually only the locks will mark this old town and it's history.

The locks were the highlight of the day. We seemed to start rolling through missing caches as we continued our quest to complete the Great 880. We did stop at a Tawawa Park in Sidney, Ohio. It was a fun place to spend time on the trails, but it too seemed to be missing a number of caches which were listed as active. We found the remains of one and had a replacement small in the backpack so we were able to replace the heavily damaged container. It's been found five times since we left a new container and trashed out the damaged on so that is a good thing.

More pawpaw fruit on the trail.

We needed sixteen finds between Shelby and Logan County. In the end it took us six and a half hours to find them. We were 3 hours from home and needed to get the dogs from camp. This was not the best day's adventure for the Great 880.