Geocaching

We did it!!! We went geocaching for the very first time ever, and we even found a cache! (more pics at that link) There is a trail system close to our home, we figured we would start there, since it has two caches. We parked at the trail head and started looking for the first one. Hmmm, that one seemed to be really close, so the kids spread out to try to find it. The description said somthing about 30 yards from the trail, under an old log, that couldn't be too hard, could it?

Well, it was! We looked for quite a while, but just could NOT find the darned box. The amazing thing was how it seemed to be really close to the car, I was wondering why they hadn't hidden it a bit farther from the parking spot. But hey, this was our first box, so what did I know? Maybe this was normal. The kids started to get discouraged, so I proposed that we would find the second box first and then come back to this one. They agreed on the wisdom of my plans :-)

We had about ¾ kilometers to go, but it was all up, up, up, and up. Nice climb, I was mentally calculating how much earlier the kids would go to sleep tonight after this steep trail (I was wrong, they didn't go to sleep even one minute earlier...) We made it close to our goal, and spent some time looking around for the cache. I am happy to tell you all that I was the one who found it!

The kids excitedly opened it, and took out all the treasures. I got the logbook and read about the other people who visited. We took a deck of Iraqi playing cards, an alien, key chain, japanese coin, necklace, and Pez dispenser. Left naked barbie, 20-sided die, a few army guys, Snow White, and barbie clothes. No, I am not sure why the barbie had to be naked, maybe because that seems to be the natural condition of barbies in our house? At least it wasn't one of the headless barbies :-)

The bugs were very annoying, we all kept swatting yet another blood saturated mosquito. Next time I might actually remember to bring bug repellant LOL. We also should have brought a stamp pad, we couldn't do the stamp because there wasn't one in the box. I told the kids to just draw the stamp pic in their log book, that would prove that we had found the cache.

We sat down for a while, enjoying the cache, the quietness, the nature, the logbook, and the mosquitoes. Made it back to the trail, where we met another hiker, who had six kids with her. I told her that she must be surprised to meet some one on this usually totally empty trail with more kids than she had with her :-) But I was surprised too, when she started talking dutch to me after she heard me say something to my kids! How amazing to meet a fellow dutch woman in the middle of nowhere.

Back to the first cache. I was sure we would find it now, but even if we wouldn't, at least we weren't total losers since we had found the other cache. Searching, searching, searching, searching, but no cache anywhere! One by one, the kids gave up... Eventually, even I gave up, planning to go to the log of the cache and see whether I could find some additional hints.

We decided to make a visit to Borders before going home, I wanted to get a book about sewing for Tara, who suddenly is very interested in it. Tara got her book, Tim found a dungeons and dragons book he wanted, and we bought a special stamp pad for our geocaching.Quick supermarket stop and then home to rest. Followed by another visit to the pool, where I found out that they will close to the summer on the 22nd! That feels very early!

I did check the log for the cache we couldn't find, and the first thing it said was 'Easy find!!' Hmmm, not in our opinion. For a moment I wondered whether maybe the cache had been stolen or so. Till I double checked everything and realized that I had entered the coordinates of the parking lot in my cache, not the one of the cache... Now that explained why the cache seemed to be hidden so close to the car. And that explained why we never found a 'close to target' reading at 30 yards off the trail.... Oh well, I guess that teaches me to pay better attention, and it enables us to go back there soon and try to find the cache again, but now at the right location :-)