I keep hearing about this geocaching thing, but we’ve never actually tried it. But with Meredith’s interest in treasure hunting, I thought maybe we should try it out. I got some advice and help from some friends online, and signed up at geocaching.com. I found information on three local “caches” that were all located pretty close to each other and rated as being good for beginners, and we set off.
There was a playground near where we parked and the girls ran off to play, while Kris and I walked along the nearby trail to see how well our GPS would work. We don’t have a geocaching GPS, just one for the car, but it has walking directions on it and seemed pretty accurate. Until it died. We wandered around without luck in the general vicinity, but eventually decided there were too many trees to just guess. I went back to the van to plug it in while Kris and the older two hung out at the playground. I had to put the keys in the ignition to give the charger power. After a few minutes, I unplugged it again, not expecting it to have much life but also not wanting to sit for too long waiting for it to charge. I locked the doors and shut them just as I remembered the keys were still in the ignition! Oops! We discussed what to do briefly. There weren’t a lot of options since we don’t even have a cell phone to call AMA. Meredith and I went wandering into the forest with the GPS while Fiona played in the sandbox at the playground and Kris used some nearby scrap wood to try and break into our car. Meredith and I still had no luck, and we returned to the van to help and we did manage to get it open again, thankfully.
We decided to try the one across the street to start instead. The clue was a little more obvious and even if our GPS didn’t work well we could see even from where we were that there wouldn’t be a lot of options about where it could be, as there were only two trees in the whole field. Finally we got lucky! Kris lifted Meredith up to peek into the crook of a tree and she was so excited to see a little film canister there.
We opened it up excitedly, not sure what to expect. Inside was a tiny toy and some scraps of paper in a baggie. The girls took the toy and we left some marbles in its place, then signed and dated the paper and carefully put everything back the way we had found it.
The high from that find had the girls excited to try again at the first place. The GPS charge seemed to be fine, so we went back over and this time it led us almost directly to a large tree with a hole between the roots that we hadn’t really noticed prior to this.
Another find! inside were a few more toys and a soaking wet notepad. We were sad to see that on most of the pages the ink had run and was virtually unreadable. We had an extra ziploc with us and put the notepad inside after we signed it, but obviously too late to save the pages that were already soaked.
The next place was a bit of a walk, but led us to a beautiful area that we had never even known existed, an old train station in a small park setting off the main road. We had less luck with this one, though the clues seemed simple and most of the comments implied the cache was easy to find.
I’m not sure if we were missing something or if it was gone, but we eventually left without finding it, much to the disappointment of the older girls. How neat though that something like this is not only a fun way to get out as a family, but also gives us the opportunity to explore and learn about new things in our area!
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