Well, we have fully immersed ourselves in the world of geocaching!! We spent the better part of the weekend out hiking and treasure hunting, thanks in part to the gorgeous weather, and also in a large part to the fact that my dad was visiting and reminded me how to read a compass properly and how to figure out coordinates. This is key to finding your cache, it is harder when you are kind of randomly looking for the cache, much better when you can read the longitude and latitude properly and pinpoint your spot, then get down to the hunting parts, quite fun really!!
I really ahve to thank Tony and Julie(their blog is on our sidebar), Tony takes the girls out often to geocache, and it sounded like fun. One day I decided to look it up, and found geocache.com, and there was no turning back then. I found tons of caches almost in our backyard and so of course we had to go in hunt of them!! Sadly our first day out was not successful, but on our second shot we found 3 and our next day out Sunday, we found another 4. It can be very addicting this whole hunting and finding game, we logged our selves in with our finds and feel very accomplished, especially since we figured that we likely covered about 7 miles of hilly hiking in the process. We left behind mostly super heroes in the caches, and took home all sorts of funny things to put in our family cache box. All of the caches are in areas we know, but have never really visited, or did not know the history of, so it was a fun look into history and the time period that made the cacher place the box there. Some of the caches were very cleverly hiden, one Jon found simply because he walked over it where it was hidden and felt the rocks slide, another was so well hidden in the rock wall I found it only because of the metallic thump I heard when I hit it!! We really like this new activity, the kids had a blast playing in the woods and hiking, even with the 10 pounds of mud they brought home on their boots and pant legs!! I have included some photos from a few of our cache finds, more will likely be coming this weekend since we have plans to meet Kate and Jeff if the weather is nice and we can go find some new hidden treasures, YIPPEE!!!!
love to all, Jamie
PS try it out, go to www.geocaching.com, and if you have garmin they ahve their own site too, and use your car GPS to pinpoint your search site, take your kids, they will have fun looking and poking about in dark holes and rock walls and digging under fallen leaves, a fun and healthy family activity!!!