Off
The Beaten Path
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Ghost Towns, Graveyards and Haunted Places
New! Just added! Flight 93 Memorial - First battle of the War on Terror Jean Bonnet Tavern - Feeding, lodging and haunting Pennsylvania for 250 years Jumonville Glen - George Washington starts a world war Fort Necessity - George Washington gets lucky
Here's what we're working on! Allegheny Portage Railroad Battle of Bushy Run Battle of the Monongahela (aka Braddock's Defeat) Johnstown Flood Massacre of Phillips' Rangers Peshtigo Fire
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Hi. This is the outdoors, travel, history and geocaching site of Alpha6 and KidsRN - explorers, adventurers and geocachers. Those are our geocaching handles. We also use them for letterboxing and are known in orienteering circles as the Cachemanian Devils. About our Site Our vision for Off The Beaten Path is a family friendly site that promotes interest in outdoor activities, curiosity about the world around us and lifelong learning. Our vehicle for that is geocaching and all that goes with it. This site is a big part of our own lifelong learning. In addition to learning on the road, we do a lot of research during trip planning and even more when we start to write it up. Plus, we've had to learn new technical skills with GPS, laptops, Blackberries and web development. It also provides some great exercise and venues for our latent skills in freelance writing and photography. Usually our adventures are built around geocaching and its older sibling letterboxing. There's also a little competition we participate in from time to time called geodashing. It's all taken us places we would have never seen otherwise. We've been to ghost towns, caves, mountain tops, waterfalls and more out of the way places than we can recall. Along the way, we've braved grizzly bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, buffalo and plague-carrying prairie dogs in addition to being out in some hellacious weather. It's been a hoot. We've geocached in 35 states and have a plan in place to finish all 50 by the end of 2012. We're also active in orienteering. There's a lot of overlap with geocaching and letterboxing although each one has unique aspects to it. Nevertheless, they complement each other well. We're regulars on the orienteering circuit with the Minnesota Orienteering Club. With the club, we worked as staff volunteers in the Wild Adventure Race series which combines biking, paddling and orienteering. We're trying to work up the nerve to run a short race next year but it looks like something best left to the youngsters.
Regardless of the activity, our favorite part of any trip is stumbling upon great things we didn't know anything about. Maybe it's a small diner with great food (like the Beartooth BBQ in West Yellowstone, MT) or a really beautiful out-of-the-way place (like Cooke Lake near Alva, WY) or a small museum with some amazing local history (like the Peshtigo Fire Museum in Peshtigo, WI). Be sure to check out our Top 10 lists . We've got a great Resources page. Don't miss the Shiloh ghost story, our own geocaching X-file. Navigating the site You can go anywhere on the site with the Sitemap link. There's one on each page. Anything on the site that's underlined is a hyperlink. Most are blue but some may be other colors. If a link opens in the same window, there is a link menu on the left side of the page which will take you around the site or you can just use the browser's back arrow. Some pages open in new windows. If so, you can toggle between windows or just close it when you're done and you'll be back where you started.
About Us Alpha6 is a retired recon Marine and former math teacher. (Check out my other site - teachkidsmath.net) KidsRN is a retired pediatric nurse. We're both in our late 50's and live in Minnesota's Twin Cities. We're also comparative newlyweds. In our previous marriages, we raised five kids. The youngest, Bravo Lima, is a geocacher too and is in some of the posted pictures. We enjoy biking, hiking, canoeing, orienteering, letterboxing, history, traveling and, of course - geocaching. We often combine a couple of those for a great outing - anything from a day to several weeks.
We've been hitting the trail together for four years years. People think we're crazy but they always have questions. Where did you go? How did you get there? How was it? And the big one - How did you ever find the place? This web site will chronicle all that and more. We hope you'll get some adventure ideas of your own or simply enjoy the views and the news. There's no armchair traveling here. We've been to every place in this web site and most of the pictures are ours. If we use another photo because it was better, we've attributed the source. We're always adding things so check back often for updates. You'll find them in the New! Just added! links section to the left. It's impossible to write about everything we do or every place we go. So we have picked out places and adventures that live up to our web site name - Off the Beaten Path. Feedback and suggestions are welcome. Feel free to send us an E-mail or comment in our guestbook. Enjoy......The Cachemanian Devils
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