Ghostly Tracks in San Antonio

Just days before Halloween, I took my kids on this adventure. As we pulled up to the area there were several other vehicles waiting their turn to try the tracks. As we creped along in line, I jumped out and dusted the rear bumper of my truck with baby powder.

When it was our turn, we pulled up to the tracks. I could see the terrain and knew that part of this was the gravity pulling your vehicle down hill, although there is a slight optical illusion of being pointed uphill. Being a dad, and wanting to make sure this worked for my excited children, I made sure the truck was pulled up “enough” to get over the hump in the road the railroad tracks naturally make.

I put the truck in neutral. Sure enough we began to roll. We rolled several feet off of the tracks, I made the sharp right-hand turn the road makes and parked in the gravel pull-out a hundred or so feet from the tracks. The kids, their mom and I got out of the truck to inspect the back.

Sure enough, there were prints! There was even one adult hand print that my son attributed to the being the bus driver.

Is this truly ghost children pushing car after car over the tracks? I don’t know. What I do know is that my wife made it to the back of the truck before the kids and I did and she was as sure to make sure the kids were creeped out before Halloween as I was. However, there were several other cars pulled over as well, all with evidence of fingerprints on the back of their cars.

Go! Try it for yourself. What could be creepier than a bus full of children, the smell of baby powder in the air and one heck of a good ghost story?

Read more about this haunted place here

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A Southwestern Texas Adventure

Travel log: We left Big Spring, TX with a truck load of camping gear, a couple of GPS receivers, two dogs, two kids and four or five days free to explore the southwestern side of Texas. We had a couple of goals in mind when we left that included crossing off a few more counties on our geocaching Texas County Challenge (check out the map for updated counties), exploring the Woodward Ranch and finding out what those Marpha Lights were all about.

We camped at the Balmorhea State Park. I was pleasantly surprised with this small state park. Its natural spring that feeds millions of gallons of fresh, cold spring water to a swimming pool that boast turtles, catfish and a number of other fish including the pupfish, which is endangered and this state park is one of the only places in the world you can see them.

Camping here was pretty good. It is West Texas, it was hot and the wind blew…a lot. Our tents survived and we found the Balmorhea State Park a good base camp for the week’s adventures.

Woodward ranch and the search for red plume agate was quite an adventure. We drove through Alpine and showed up to the ranch around noon. We spent about five hours kicking rocks and poking around. We were actually pretty successful, finding many small “fingerlings” and one significant find that when cut right could bring two or three thousand dollars to the “adventure fund”!

On the fourth day we explored the Davis Mountains State Park and finished off the daylight hours cooking up a pot of spaghetti in the picnic area. As the sun began to set, we headed for Marpha to check out these mysterious lights. Well, there not kidding. It really is a modern day mystery. Read more about the Marpha lights and our adventure there in this article, The Marpha Lights: A Modern Desert Mystery.

We did quite a bit of geocaching, rock kickin’ and swimming. Texas has a lot of hidden locations that should be marked on any adventurer’s maps. The desert, away from city lights is always amazing at night. We had the moon set around 5 am one morning when the Milky Way was bright and visible. There were jillions of stars and universes to contemplate until the sun began to peek up, marking another hot day full of fun and exploration!

San Antonio Run

Although mostly solo, the past couple of days was pretty adventurous. While on a business trip to San Antonio I was able to knock out nine more counties for the Texas County Challenge. That makes us 5.8% complete! At this rate we should finish the challenge sometime in 2016! You can check out our progress on our map, just click on the link to the right titled Progress Map.

I made the trip down on the 28th and back today. Due to time constraints, I was only able to find one or two caches in each county (Total of 11 for the trip). Except one, all where either Ghost Towns or Cemeteries (Eden). The trip was a good one, and will publish pictures and maybe a story or two toward the end of the week.

The Soash Ghost Town

Who can resist a geocache next to a ghost town? Well, not us...and as we begin our Texas County Challenge, I have been doing a bit of research and have found MANY geocaches around ghost towns...I will be creating a bookmark list on GC.com over the next few weeks. Feel free to use it as well as keeping up here.

Soash the ghost town is a pretty interesting story. It was really a flash in the pan. The only remains are what is left of the Soash Bank.


Link to: Texas Ghost Towns: Soash

Link to: Soash - A Historical Pipe Dream Geocache

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The Texas County Challenge

Here is the map of our progress so far!

We have decided to begin the Texas County Challenge. There are 256 counties in Texas and we are making progress! We are not setting a timeline for this challenge (yeah, right, sometime in 2016 I reckon!). There are estimates of approximately 14,000 miles driven to complete the challenge.

If you want to checkout Geocaching or the Texas County Challenge, here is the cache page.