Geocaching

Geocaching

My friend Glen introduced me to Geocaching in 2003. I thought it was kind of neat, but didn't do anything with it until 2006. My boys and I were going to drive from Florida to Illinois and I thought it would be cool to try to find some geocaches along the way. I downloaded info for half a dozen. Unfortunately, we only found one but it was fun trying. Ever since then I've been receiving the e-newsletter from Groundspeak--a Geocaching community--and mostly ignoring it.

A few months ago my friend Allison mentioned Geocaching along with her family's plans to vacation in Yellowstone. This piqued my interest again, and I opened the next newsletter that arrived. It had a story about a guy that found a cache that had been unfound for over 10 years, somewhere in the middle of Canada. I thought that was pretty cool, and opened the next newsletter. Groundspeak was hyping "31 Days of Geocaching" in August so I thought I'd get back into geocaching by trying to do the 31-day streak.

A few days ago I updated my profile on geocaching.com and started looking for nearby areas to search for caches. I downloaded Groundspeak's app and picked out the cache with which I wanted to begin. And then that was all thrown out the window :)  My husband Mike and I were out at lunch at Wahoo Grill when I checked "geocaches near here". It said there was one 400 feet away and I figured we could grab it easily. Well, it wasn't so easy and we didn't find it; I chickened out when I saw a whole bunch of what looked like poison ivy.

On the drive home I did a search for geocaches nearby and one popped up in Possum Creek Park. Ever since we got our new puppy, we've been going to that park almost every day. They have an awesome dog park and it's a great place for our little Titus to run around like a crazy man :) I looked up the cache when we got home and saw that the last few people that found the cache said the log was full and soaked. I thought I'd be helpful so I took some small pieces of paper, stapled them together, and put them in a ziplock bag to put in the cache.

When we went to the park in the late afternoon we took a brief detour to look for the geocache. I found it, but my plan failed. The cache was too small to fit what I brought. Mike struggled to fit one more piece of paper into the cache and we counted that good enough, even though it will probably get soaked from the existing wad of paper that used to be the log. Oh well, we tried. The important part is that we found it and had fun doing so :)

Mike and Titus witnessing my find :)

Afterwards we went to the dog park and Titus got to play with a nice dog that loved to run. He got nice and tired :)