Last week I mentioned the new field geek sport the wife and I have gotten involved in, geocaching.

But there is another aspect to that game, a more recent addition to the sport.

For the lack of a better word, "benchmarking."

For those who don't look at maps much, benchmarks are markers set down by surveyors to identify an exactly known spot or elevation. And further survey efforts are based on their distance and angle from those known points. Sometimes existing landmarks are used, like water towers or smokestacks. Something fixed that can be seen from a distance.

But most are natural high points of land, with the specific known site marked with a brass disk (hence the common name, "brasscaps," but not all brasscaps are benchmarks).

Anyway, the website has acquired the database for CGS benchmarks, and folks are now seeking them out, documenting them, and then logging their discoveries. The beauty of seeking benchmarks is that their locations and directions to them are given in plain English. (Well, okay, so it's not plain English. It's surveyors' English, which is a lot like engineers' English. It's understandable, but it takes some effort.)

So, last Wednesday evening, I convinced the wife to go hunting benchmarks.

The first was the water tower in our town.

Not exactly a challenge.

The next wasn't much harder. If you dug through the whole gobbledy-gook paragraph of surveyors' English, what you figured out is that the brasscap was on the left side of the second step of the south doorway of the county courthouse.

And so it was.

Third on our list for the day was only a couple blocks away, on City Hall.

This one was fun to photograph, since it was on a ledge outside someone's office, hidden behind a pine tree. So guess who got to crawl out on the ledge for the close-up photograph? (At absolutely no risk to life or limb as you can see from the photo, but I would have had a great time explaining to the authorities, in this day and age of Homeland Paranoia, why I was crawling on a ledge outside the Mayor's office window (Or was that the council chamber? I didn't look in.))

Noticed that the wife stayed across the street in the Explorer. With the engine running. Whether to disassociate herself from me and my activities, or just a quick getaway, I do not know.

Next on our hunt list for the evening was at the railroad depot, again only a couple blocks away. Wife found this one, a verticle marker, quickly.

Then it was back to our local historic site, where we documented yet another water tower benchmark.

Then, across the street, back to the cemetery, for our last hunt of the day. This went as easily as the others (not all since that day have gone so well), finding the concrete pad and disk right by the corner where they're supposed to be, leaving us with our total of six successful hunts on our first outing.

Then it was another hour or so of wandering the cemetery. Stumbled on at least two sections reserved for infants which, as Whinybutt already mentioned so well in her entry, is hard to pass through untouched.

We also came up with the design we want for our headstone, when the time comes. Which is oddly comforting.

Little did we know we unknowingly passed right by yet another benchmark. Which we finally found on Sunday.

Which is why I write this entry now, so that I can finally write down the one for Sunday, without a lot of explanations.