In Pursuit of the World Turtle

This weekend, Tom and I went in pursuit of the World Turtle. After I told him about the Hidden Creatures campaign, and my thoughts on how to get all of the souvenirs within the required time frame, Tom asked me to figure out how we could knock it all out in one or two days. The ideas I came up with were hiking trails and biking trails, but he insisted on something that was more like a power trail, that we could drive along. That's when I proposed trying the TAD (Trails Across Delmarva) caches. Most of the TAD segments were about twenty caches long, but there was one segment that started close to Sharptown, MD with thirty caches leading up to Laurel, DE. Forty caches after Laurel, the road intersects Route 113, and depending on which direction you chose, you would encounter twenty to twenty-five more caches.
We had a good start, we found our first creature, Bigfoot, on the day the campaign started, since we needed to fill that day in on our cache calendar. Then yesterday, the real work began. All in all, we attempted to find 97 and a half caches (once on site at one cache, I thought I heard something rustling in the long grass at ground zero, so I chose to abort rather than get attacked by some rabid field mouse, hence the half), and had to DNF fifteen of them. The DNFs were a combination of me being in a hurry, because I wanted to get as much of this trail completed as possible so that the next day would be that much easier, along with the 100 degree weather, as well as (gasp!) the possibility that the caches were actually not there. I mean, when you check the base of a telephone pole for a container, along a cable winding up the pole for a bison tube and behind the numbers for a bag with a log, there aren't many more places to check (well, except the old "hole in a pole" cache, but these weren't that tricky - or were they?). I wasn't going to sweat it (unless I was outside of the air-conditioned car), and we kept plugging along. By the end of the day, we'd acquired eleven more Hidden Creature souvenirs, and were only short seventeen for the final one.

We decided to stay closer to home for our search today, and since White Marsh had a bunch of caches that seemed to be close together, we headed there. My initial intention was to find five or six, since I have eleven or twelve days that need filled out on my cache calendar before the campaign ends, but once we started finding (and not finding) caches, Tom decided that we should just go for it and get the World Turtle. Of the twenty-one caches attempted, seventeen were found, three were not and one I just looked at (there was no possible was I was getting up into that tree without a ladder). In the end, we were successful, and I don't have to stress out about getting this completed.