Fried Cup Tree - DAYLIGHT ONLY Traditional Geocache
Fried Cup Tree - DAYLIGHT ONLY
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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DAY LIGHT HOURS ONLY PLEASE! Look for the cache in one of the mugs on the tree.
Permission granted by Nancy Massey - Owner. I chatted with Nancy for over two hours. Nancy is great lady with a rich assortment of tales. I also met her nephew, John. He is also a very nice guy. Thanks to Luckyone80 for helping keep this cache alive.
PICTURES ENCOURAGED!
The cache takes you to a place so unique that the name of the road that the object is near is named after it. You are looking for a pre-form in one of the mugs on the tree.
One of Missouri's more unusual roadside attractions has to be "The Cup Tree." Known to visitors of the Lake of the Ozarks west side for decades, this once stately old black oak is now just a tall stump.
"I've told so many lies about it I sometimes wonder just what the truth is," said Fred Moore who has lived on the "cuptree" land for more than 75 years. Moore latest tale is that the tree got started one day when he and his wife were sitting in the yard and someone brought over some cups and saucers. "One thing led to lead to another and soon the old lady and I were fighting," Moore said. "Pretty soon she started throwing the darn things at me. The cups I caught, I nailed to the tree. The ones I missed fell to the ground and broke." It's hard to tell just how much of the story is true and how much is made up as he's telling it, but no matter how the thing got started, the first cup was nailed to the tree more than 30 years ago.
The tree is so well known around the lake that it's become a landmark used by neighbors to give directions to strangers. As in, "go down this road until you see a tree with a bunch of coffee cups hanging on it, then turn....."
The tree is about five-and-a-half miles down Lake Road 135-3 near the Morgan and Camden County line. It is listed on maps of the lake area and visitors frequently stop by Moore's house to ask how it got started. And quite of few of them bring along their own cups to add to the tree. The black oak on which the cups hangs on used to be a beautiful shade tree, buts its no longer in good shape. It leans to the side as if its about to topple over and its only about ten feet tall.
Moore blames the tree's demise on his sister-in-law. "She used copper nails to hang some cups on it and she killed it dead as a mackerel," Moore said. But Moore doesn't plan to stop the tradition of the cup tree when the old oak finally does give-up-the-ghost. He's already staked out a certain wild cherry he thinks will be the perfect relative to inherit the cups and he plans to keep the cup tradition going as long as people are interested.
There's another spot on Moore's land that's beginning to gain nearly as much fame as the cup tree. Moore's newest tourist draw is the shoe fence.
At a dumpsite just down the road from Moore's house there is a spot where folks have started hanging shoes on a fence. But unlike the origin of the cup tree, Moore is a little clearer about how the shoe tradition started. "There's a saying around here that during deer season that anybody who's caught poaching will be shot and the only thing left to remember them by will be their shoes," he said.
Source: The Breezy Point Resort Website. Link 
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Cersbez va n zht.