Surprise Disoveries

Have you ever been browsing the grid and all of a sudden you remember a location that you can cross-post into an especially tough category? Or out of the blue remember a location that you drive by daily that would fit into one of those tough categories? This happened to me three times this week.

For my bingo I needed to find a WWII Site and a Railroad Disaster site. I knew of several WWII sites that I could use, but the railroad site eluded me. Then out of nowhere I remembered some info I had come across when doing research for some of my Seattle monorail waymarks. The monorail had crashed at the Seattle Center station back in the 1970's and I have that station waymarked in 5 or more categories - a happy discovery.

Another discovery was a forgotten shipwreck. I was looking through past summer photos and remembered a cool park that I had visited two summers ago on the Pacific coast. While there I waymarked the ruins of an old ship, the S.S. Catala. I hadn't thought about the category at the time - just waymarked the place so I could find it later on my next visit to the coast. So I loaded the info and photos up and at this point am waiting for it to be reviewed.

The final find is a place that I drive by every Saturday on my way to downtown Tacoma. There's a gated community with a faux lighthouse that's used as the guardhouse at the front entrance. I've always thought that it was so cheesy, especially for a development with only about 10 houses that have a water view (of the distant industrial Tacoma harbor). The gatehouse isn't one of those. As I drove by it today it finally clicked, "hey, a landlocked lighthouse!". I'll be finishing the submission of that waymark later today.

There are so many categories now that it's easy for me to forget about a few until I browse the grid trying to fill in holes. As new categories are created I forget about some of those older waymarks I have that can be cross-posted. It's my own version of being a dreaded armchair waymarker. So you waymarkers out there, don't forget to look back at some of those old waymarks. You never know what you'll find.

The above photo is of the S.S. Catala. It was taken the day before it was discovered that the ship was full of oil. A couple friends and I just happened to discover it on a girls weekend to the coast. We returned home to see it on the front page of the paper. The EPA is now excavating the vessel and removing the oil from this protected habitat of two birds on the endangered species list. So far 13,000 gallons have been removed from 2 of the 5 tanks.