I recently spent a weekend in Southeast Massachusetts. There was no snow there, as opposed to home, so it was a great place to go geocaching and work on my quest to find a geocache in every one of the 351 towns in Massachusetts, as well as the 1,498 towns in all of New England.

There’s a relatively new virtual geocache out on Cape Cod titled Lighthouses of Massachusetts Virtual Challenge. Now, I’ve been to a bunch of lighthouses during my travels in Massachuestts, but this Challenge didn’t exist then. I don’t have photographs of all the lighthouses I’ve visited, as asked for in this Challenge. I went through what I had prior to this trip and found out I can prove I was at 15 lighthouses out of the 18 needed. I had six lighthouses I could photograph myself at on this trip alone.

One of my goals this weekend were two webcam geocaches in the Massachusetts town of Chatham. I already had found a geocache in that town, but hadn’t logged these two webcams. There are no more new webcam geocaches being put out (something I wish they would change) so I try to grab these when I can in case they get archived. In this case, the one was easy enough outside of a bookstore (top left). The other one said that the camera only takes pictures twice a day at 10:10AM and 2:10PM. I planned accordingly, then found out it was actually 9:10AM, not 10:10AM so I missed the time to get the picture. Since I had planned based on the information on the cache page, I took a photo of myself at the proper location and logged the cache.

This was the first time I saw actual cranberry bogs! I’d never come across them before, but even in the middle of winter, they are quite distinctive to see. I would see more over my adventures in Massachusetts the next few weeks, but the bulk of them seem to be in the area south of Boston.

In Yarmouth, there was a virtual at this old tree on property belonging to the Yarmouth Historical Society. There were a lot of nice trails with more geocaches on them, but since it was drizzly almost all weekend, I didn’t walk around looking for any. Most were quick grabs with nearby parking.

Likewise, this virtual geocache was on top of a hill with a lookout tower. It almost looked like another lighthouse, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t open the day I was there, but when it is, there;s a fabulous view!

There were a couple of former forts in the area. Fort Hill really doesn’t exist anymore in any shape or form. That’s the top two pictures but they have some nice trails to walk on. Fort Phoenix has a few more buildings, memorials, and markers making it a bit more interesting.

If you visit Fall River, Massachusetts, you know you’ll find some things related to Lizzie Borden. My fellow geocachers did not disappoint! There was a virtual geocache, a puzzle geocache, and an Adventure Lab that took me to the house where her parents were killed, the house she lived in after her trial (Maplecroft), as well as her grave in the nearby cemetery. I’d like to come back and stay some time at the first house, which is now a bed and breakfast.

One of the last geocaches I did that weekend was in someone’s front yard. I don’t like going near houses, even when people know about the geocache, but this was an exception. Whoever created this beautiful area did a terrific job and it was fun to walk around and look at everything there (and find the geocache).

Although the weather wasn’t terrific that weekend, I did manage to accomplish a lot. I found 48 geocaches, including the two webcam caches, and crossed 24 towns off of my “to do” list.