AAR: Antietam Adventure

Today, Tom and I went to Antietam National Battlefield in Sharpsburg, MD and worked on the Antietam Adventure - a ten stage lab cache put out by the Maryland Geocaching Society. Unlike most lab caches that I've completed, which only last the few days surrounding a Mega event, this one began in 2016 and has a duration of about five years. At the first stage, we got a Master Key, which preceded the answers for each subsequent stage. At stages two through seven, information for a word puzzle was gathered and after the puzzle had been solved, we learned what information needed to be gathered at stages eight and nine to solve a second puzzle, and the tenth stage. Videos accompanied the completion of each stage and were a nice touch, as well as educational. The route we took around the battlefield followed the driving tour, so we were able to work on a Wherigo (Antietam - The Bloodiest Day) at the same time.
Even though I had gathered the answers for six of the stages before arriving in Sharpsburg, we still spent six hours at the battlefield. Even though these ten finds don't count towards our "official" find count, I'm still very glad that we took the opportunity to visit the battlefield and learn what we did. If not for these lab caches, I probably wouldn't have taken the time to learn as much as I did.