Steps to Everywhere

NOTE: This geocache blog might contain spoilers. As with all things geocaching, proceed at your own risk.

Chad and I finally got a chance to do some more geocaching last Saturday. It was a gorgeous, sunny day, and we knocked out six easy caches in downtown Kernersville. Because this post would get way too long if I tried to tell you about all of them, I thought I’d pick my favorite one of the day to talk about, a cache called Guardian Angel.

The geocacher who placed it, Night-Ranger, said in the description that, “It’s like steps to nowhere.” That comment alone piqued my interest enough to go check it out. Even if I didn’t find the geocache itself, I wanted to see this place. It sounds like the kind of thing that begs to have a story written about it. Plus, the coordinates weren’t that far from the cache we had just completed, The Pretentious E, Your Cache Has Been Posted.

We walked down Mountain Street, because that’s where we were, then across a short stretch of grass and some railroad tracks to what turned out to be the back of a strip mall that included a carniceria that was cooking something that smelled oh, my god, delicious!

As usual, Chad and I approached the cache site from the wrong direction, but for once it didn’t matter. As soon as I saw these steps, I told Chad, “That’s got to be where it is.”

Steps to everywhere

What a wonderful spot! I love those steps, leading up the hill and through the trees to we can’t really tell where. The statue of the little girl watching people come by. Not quite a weeping angel, but close enough to demand an obligatory, “Don’t blink!”

Seriously, if you don't get the "Don't blink!" reference, I'm coming to your house with my Dr. Who DVDs.

And it is the type of thing that begs to have a story written about it. After I found the cache and signed the log, I snapped a few pics of the steps and the statue. I’m not quite sure what the story’s about yet, but I do know this: these aren’t steps to nowhere. They’re steps to everywhere. Where couldn’t they take you, if you had the right token and the girl let you pass? And where would they take you if you had no token at all?

The story I just finished, tenatively titled “Hand-Me-Downs”, was inspired by a picture Mark Rainey showed me of a cache site in High Point that has a swingset in the middle of a graveyard. If I can find enough cache sites like that one and Guardian Angel, I’d like to do a collection of short stories inspired by them, complete with the coordinates so even non-geocachers can go to the spot and see where the story took place. It’s an idea.

Tempting as it was to climb the steps at Guardian Angel and head back across the railroad tracks to Mountain Street, we went around the front of the strip mall instead so we could stick to the road on our way to our next geocache target, the not-as-aptly-named-as-I-feared Sewer Pipeline. Which, again as usual, we came at from the wrong direction, so we spent a good 20 minutes mucking around in garbage and mud looking for the cache until Chad wandered about 20 feet away and found it in a place that we would have spotted in 30 seconds if we’d come at it from the right direction.

Yeah, he owes me for that one.