Geocaching

Our family has a new hobby...geocaching.  I had been hearing several different people from here talking about geocaching but I had no idea what in the world it was.  So, one night after our Wednesday night class (Bringing Up Boys) was over, one of the moms started talking about geocaching.  So, I was finally able to find out some good information on it.  Once she started talking about it, I KNEW this was right up Aaron and Connor's alley!!!  Basically, it is a worldwide treasure hunt.  Different people hide different things, post it on geocaching.com with the coordinates of the location and then people take that information and go looking for whatever happens to be hidden.  Some of the people give good hints, others none at all.

I'd say we have it a little easier than some people because we have a iPad.  So, we log into geocaching, find what we want to find and take the iPad with us.  It can put us within 30 feet of the "treasure" with the GPS that is built into the iPad.  We went to our first excursion last weekend.  The first one we went looking for we figured would be really easy to find.  But, it was located on a fairly busy 4 lane highway here, and although there was a great parking area (In fact it is located right next to the interstate, so it really is a parking area for people carpooling) for us to park and be safe, we felt really weird looking in the wooded area with all these people watching us.  So, we said "forget this" to that one.  Then we headed to a local water area that has waterfalls.  We had to do some hiking (which we wish we had known we were going to do so we would have worn tennis shoes instead of flip flops), but it was so much fun.  I wanted to look over at the falls, but if something would have happened and I would have slipped, well, you wouldn't be reading this post.  So, I stayed very, very far away with the kiddos.  We looked and looked for the split hemlock tree.  Finally, Aaron found it.  And, there attached to it was this little cylinder looking thing that had several sheets of paper in it with tons of people's names and where they were from located on it.  There were people from our town, of course, but then there was even one from as far away as Seattle!  Here are some pictures of us on our first excursion.

What and where is that hemlock???  Neither one of us really knew what a hemlock looked like, so we just used process of elimination!

Connor getting the geocache!

Aaron putting it back where we found it.

The hike back up the trail

After this find, we headed over to the local university where there were many geocaches hidden.  The first one over there took us a while.  And, Blake and I finally found that one.  After this, we were HUNGRY!  So, we headed over and ate some yummy Mexican food.  While we were there, Connor talked us into doing "just 1 more, please!"  So, we went to find "just one more" and ended up getting talked into 2 more. 

That was the end for that day.  We haven't had a chance to go again as Aaron has been working late and I worked Saturday morning.  Hopefully next weekend we'll be able to get a few more.  What a great family outing.  Lots of heart smiling moments!!!