Memorial Day 2014: The Best of Columbus

Upon arrival at the Holiday Inn in Hilliard we were dead tired and we were burned out on the never-ending construction zones and particularly excessive police patrolling of the interstates. Chris barely had it in him to pick up a pizza from DiCarlo’s. DiCarlo’s Pizza started in Wheeling and is truly my husband’s favorite pizza (though I definitely love it too). They bake the square crust with their homemade sauce and then add the toppings after baking. I also love that they use provolone rather than the more popular mozzarella cheese on the pizza. The Hilliard location doesn’t live up to the original in taste and their large pizza is smaller than those in the Wheeling area, but it’s close enough when you’re in a nostalgic pinch.

The Holiday Inn we stayed was probably the nicest of the chain I’ve ever seen. Frankly, it seemed to me like they weren’t even building new hotels and that most of the efforts of their parent organization were going toward their newer, more business oriented chains, like Holiday Inn Express. But the deal I got on Hotwire was not to be messed with. The lobby was stunning, featuring a full service bar and restaurant. The entire hotel also had a very pleasant smell to it, very relaxing. But, most importantly, the king bed in our room let us sleep like a dream.

There were five geocaches in Columbus that had our attention on this trip. After some thought, we decided that only four of them would be feasible. We had to skip 7 Realms of Darkness because it is a night cache in a park that closes at 10:00pm. We love night caches because they’re a completely different sensory experience. The thought crossed our mind that we could try to accomplish the cache in the daylight but, in light of our experience in Twinsburg, we decided the cache was likely best pursued in the way the cache owner intended (and earned a substantial number of favorite points for!). But we were by no means disappointed by the rest of the area offerings.

Our first stop was JUST ANOTHER MICRO IN AN EVERGREEN, which earns its popularity via its unique host. However, we found an identical cache almost exactly a year earlier, the similarly titled Another #$&@$%#! Micro in the Woods?!?! at the eastbound welcome center on I-64 in West Virginia.

It was the next cache, Hidden Waterfall – Dublin, OH, that proved to be the most memorable of the day. Like with the Twin Pirates Treasure Hunt, we seemed to be snaking through average residential streets and parking in a gravel lot next to what appeared to be an average municipal park. A few hundred feet in, the sight took our breath away and we found the perfect hideaway for a hot summer day. We stood on the edge of the creek admiring this hidden gem that we had all to ourselves this morning. On the way back to the car we ran into a woman and her dog, Angel, who were trying to visit all of the parks in the area before her beautiful black lab succumbed to an aggressive bone cancer. It made us think about our dear Dolly who departed for the Rainbow Bridge in March but, for once, not in a sad way.

A small part of the hidden waterfalls of Dublin, Ohio

After this peaceful find, we moved along to Westerville to seek Boo Spyders’ Mama. This was another cache that reminded us of a prior find, this time it was Son of the Polecat in Hagerstown, Maryland. As we retrieved the container, we couldn’t stop laughing at the creativity involved.

Our final stop in Columbus brought us to Topiary Park in downtown Columbus. On the former site of the Ohio School for the Education of the Deaf, this urban sanctuary offers locals a place to find peace and folks like us to land a cache. A Sunday Afternoon Cache is a virtual that required us to explore the park in order to find information about the history of the location and importance of this little island of green among the concrete and stone ocean. At the heart of the park is an arbor tribute to a French painting that the following photograph does no justice for.

Topiary or Deaf School Park in Downtown Columbus