So it's been almost 2 full months since my last New Thing and I finished April's just in the nick of time. On recommendation from my friend Heather, I went Geocaching with Jodie, Caelen, Mike, and Annie. If you've never heard of Geocaching before, basically it's a live treasure hunt except that the treasures are just fun, useless trinkets and junk. There are literally thousands of "caches" hidden all over the country. These are small containers that include a log book and small treasures that you can take and leave. You go to the website, http://www.geocaching.com/, look up your location you want to hunt in, and it gives you the GPS locations of the many caches in your area. If you are lucky enough to have an I-phone or I-pad (or awesome friends who have one), there is an app. that will lead you to the locations.
The excitement began immediately on our first cache hunt just a minute down the road from my house. It appeared to be off a trail just at the end of a cul-de-sac. We parked the car, camera, bag of trinkets, and a pantsless baby in tow. Getting no more than 10 feet from the car, we were stopped by the owner of the property we were about to walk through. We told her what we were doing and she insisted she did not have anything of the sort on her property. She allowed us, reluctantly, to take a look around as I told her I'd be sure to put a note on the website saying the cache was on private property (which I did by the way). We discovered the cache was actually on a wildlife preserve that was just yards off her property line. This one was cleverly called "Thin Mint" as it was hidden by a Girl Scout troop many years ago.
We signed the log, leaving our mini-clicker toy, and gaining a pretty, purple, plastic, flower ring, and ventured on to the next one. It was quite close to the first so we walked further into the woods, around some flooded swamps, and through a lot of mud to get to this one. We looked for a while but had no luck finding it. Back through the mud to the car and we were on our way again.
The next few that we looked for were much more successful. One off the road in a park, one in the fair grounds, another outside of a bar, and the final one at the tiny little Holland city airport. As the sun set and wind picked up, we ended our Geocaching expedition at Captain Sundae. No caches there, just great ice cream. Thank you friends for joining the fun. I'm sure there will be a Geocaching part 2 in the future.
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| Caelen is holding the little green truck we got from the last cache. |
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| Ahh, modern technology... |
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| One of the caches we found at the airport. It contained an assortment of toy airplanes. Caelen really enjoyed the blue one. |
