Meeting "Pegleg"

Yup, the guy in the song.

a freshly found geocache.

The little French lady(LFL) and I decided to do some geocaching yesterday.  The temperature was just right for it.  Not too hot, not too cold.  We had some errands to run in the south end of Myrtle Beach, so we thought we might as well find a few caches in the area.  

Our first stop was the Myrtle Beach flea market.  We dropped off a bunch of books at Dan's book booth and picked up a few new ones while we were there.  We have brought so many books there that we actually have a credit balance.  It works for Dan and it works for us.  

We checked one of our geocache, located at  the flea market.  The cache is called "One man's treasure", an appropriate name.  It was in excellent condition.  

Then we headed further south to Surfside Beach to find the caches we had noted on our index cards. We found four caches.  For one of them, I crawled under some boardwalk stairs for about fifteen minutes, looking for it.  I was to the point of exhaustion and I was almost wedged underneath when my wife, the above mentioned little French lady, hollered "I found it."  Not anywhere near me.

I told her to sign the log and call 911 to get me out of this spot.  I finally slithered out from the boardwalk.

The next cache we found, we met a nice French Canadian couple.  My wife and the couple chatted for twenty minutes.  I contributed to the conversation by saying all the French I could remember.  In this case it was "pate chinois" which is Shepherd's Pie.   I kept repeating that.  The husband kept calling me "Tony".  He thought all americans were called "Tony".

After that I needed a nap, so the little French lady drove me home.

This morning we had to go to the mall; since Chapin Park was on our route, we decided to find a new cache which had been placed there just a few hours earlier.

When we arrived at the spot of the cache there was a homeless man with an artificial leg standing very close to the spot where the cache should be. Uh..oh!  We will ignore him, if we can.

We ignored him but he didn't ignore us.  "Whatcha lookin for?" he asked.

"A geocache.", the LFL replied.  "What's that?"  We explained what geocaching was and he helped us look for the cache.  The LFL found it after a long search.  The homeless guy was happy for us.

We introduced ourselves to him.  He introduced himself as Mike, but told us everyone calls him "Pegleg Mike".

He had his leg blown off in Vietnam.  He lost two buddies and a leg that day.  He came home to Charlotte, North Carolina and a few years later his wife was killed in a car accident.  He became homeless shortly after that.

He told us he had a song written about him called "Pegleg Mike" by Owen Poteat.  I checked it out. It's true. I like the song.  We both enjoyed talking to "Pegleg" very much.  He is an interesting guy who had some unfortunate circumstances in his life.

guess which one is "Pegleg"?

We have met some interesting people on our little excursions.  If we had ignored Mike,  we would never have met such an interesting person.
He looks like Willie Nelson a bit.  His name is Michael Johnson.  We will be seeing him again, hopefully.