Birthday Cache

Last week, it was my friend M's birthday, so what else would we do than hide a cache for her! So, on Wednesday, in the pouring rain, I went out to two remote ponds in Vermont with my friend I to hide a birthday cache for her. The kids somehow were not thrilled with the rain, I wonder why not. I had only five of them with me, the other two were at a friend's house. We hid the cache at the other side of the pond from where the parking area was, there was a connection that was easy to cross, no water on it during this time of the year. We decided that we didn't have to hike in too far today, the rain was kind of interfering with our caching experience.

Of course, when we decided that we wanted to hide the cache now, we could not find a good spot! Suddenly all the rocks had disappeared, the trees didn't have any good root holes to hide anything in, and no convenient stacks of broken sticks was presenting itself. Eventually I found a lonely rock, and just put the cache behind it, covered it with some stuff and we ran back to the car.

Fast forward to yesterday, when we presented our cache to M. We discovered that the rain of the last few days had filled the connection thingy with lots of water. Oops! This made it a bit harder to get to the other side. Heck, it made it a LOT harder to get to the other side. I ended up with a wet left foot, Kate had two wet feet, and Tara discovered that there was a gaping crack in one of her rain boots. M had to pour water out of Tara's boot.

Short hike to the cache hiding place, there was a spot with lots of mud and water, but easy to avoid by taking a kind of short cut. They did find the cache and the the normal amount of grabbing, crying, fighting ensued. Eventually they all settled on whatever they wanted. M found her birthday presents, and took a cute seahorse which Kate had selected for the cache in our local thrift store :-) The sea horse is going to be one of her travel bugs.

Fast hike back to the car (managed to get both of my feet wet this time), and there turned out to be a traveling cache hidden close by too. What a coincidence. OK, maybe my friend I planned it that way :-) Cees found that one, but we gave it to M to hide next, because it was her birthday.

Now we had to hurry back home, because we had invited some friend to celebrate M's birthday with us. I even had baked a cake for her, have to admit that it wasn't perfectly decorated, just a simple devil's food cake with vanilla frosting, but hey, at least it was home baked.

And today, the Vermont Geocaching Organization featured me as the featured Geocacher. I am honored.