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Good morning. Today is Monday, January 14th, 2013.
Today's topic is Visual Discovery... so let's roll!
We'll cover three of my favorite hobbies on today's journey.
Favorite Number One: Clover Hunting.
I tend to be quite a good clover hunter. I can usually find four leaf clovers almost every week of the year.
Only one out of every 10,000 clovers has four or more leafs,
but there are a lot of factors that will help you find them with a higher probability,
...just knowing where to look. That depends on traffic patterns, wind circulation,
...even street lamps and tension lines, which we'll see here on the right.
And some of those patches over there are some of my favorites to go searching nearby.
But we're not going to go hunting today, ecause that's going to take too much time that we don't have.
The middle of January is pretty lousy weather to be hunting clovers anyhow.
So, next, it's time to go off-road a little bit, to talk about our second of our favorite activities,
Geocaching.
Ahead of us lies a little-known staircase, that's barely visible from either of the streets that it corners,
...much less from Gabraith Road above.
And we're going to do a little off-road from the right side of this hand rail.
In a nutshell, Geocaching is a game of hide and seek.
You get the description and GPS coordinates from Geocaching.com,
and go searching for this hidden container, where you get to sign a log book that will prove
that you located and found the container in question.
What we see here in front of us is just the kind of place I'd love to hide a geocache,
but because it's part of the public sidewalk system, I'd have to first ask permission from the City of Cincinnati.
Now to be perfectly honest, Geocaching isn't a hobby for everybody.
I've got plenty of friends who would never be convinced to go out on the trails,
looking for some kind of conceiled peanut butter jar, wrapped in camophlage tape, hidden somewhere out in the woods.
But it's also an opportunity to see the forest, parks, and other sights
out there, urban settings and such, that you would never otherwise get to see!
So there are plenty of other really cool aspects of geocaching,
I'll be able to discuss in future episodes.
But in the mean time, we've arrived at the top of Galbraith Road,
and we're on our next leg of our journey of discovery.
If geocaching isn't for you, then you might be interested in a related hobby called "Waymarking."
It really have a good appeal with shutterbugs, because instead of dealing with hidden containers,
youre dealing with things that are visually noteworthy.
Anything from geographical benchmarks to historic markers, buildings & neon signs,
cabooses, gazebos... You name it. You've got thousands of categories out there.
Okay. With a little movie magic, we got across the street on Galbraith Road,
to reach our final destination in our Visual Discovery part One.
This final leg was for reaching this geographical benchmark that I discovered,
walking along the sidewalk,
and to my amazement, it's not on any of the databases.
So there you have it, a geographical survey benchmark disk,
called "Traverse Station 2166," from 1952!
Next week, I'll try to deliver Visual Dicovery Part Two,
and head farther down Galbraith Road so we can discover
another geocache, benchmark, and a clover patch that's one of the richest I've seen in the area.
For more information on geocaching and waymarking,
feel free to look for links in the YouTube Description doodbly-doo.
Until next week, this is Joel "TwistyNye," signing off,
wishing you all "Happy Trails!"