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Saturday, December 11, 2010

Geocaching II

We went geocaching again last Sunday (see here for the first expedition, as well as an explanation of what geocaching is). The whole family came this time. We went after three caches, and we found them all. Read on...

Our first cache was nearby in the Safeway parking lot. That's all we knew. I parked in front and let my GPS tell me where to go. We soon learned that the cache was behind the store. We looked behind a tall metal cabinet thingie and found the skeletal remains of a bird. No picture for this one, sorry! The cache turned out to be underneath a metal plate on a lightpost. Nikki saw that it was loose and pulled it upwards. We found a little sardine tin underneath. We took some items and left some of our items, tiny as they were. They had to be, this thing was tiny. I forgot what the items were, sorry.


We got back in the car and headed for the next one. (I would just walk but everyone else gets tired quicker than I do.) This one was in a trail behind a bunch of houses. We found it pretty quickly under a tree. There was what looked like a birdhouse, but upon closer inspection, it most definitely was not. Observe:


The owner of this cache had built the semi-birdhouse himself. That's really neat! I also loved the way the "chest o' trinkets" looked, as well as the log book. Here's a picture of me holding both.


We also found our first travel bug in this cache. A travel bug is a trackable dog tag that you can place in a cache. It's usually attached to an item in some way. This allows you to track your item online. The item becomes a hitchhiker that is carried from cache to cache (or person to person) in the real world and you can follow its progress online. The one we found was in a small plastic bag with a lego.


This travel bug is "racing" with another travel bug. Whichever one goes the most miles wins. They both started in the U.K.! The travel bug with the yellow lego is till in the U.K. This red one made it to Florida, then up to Canada, back down to New Mexico, and ended up in Arizona - first partway up Mount Lemmon, and now down here near us. What a trip! The unfortuante thing is, our car is not so good. Otherwise we'd bring it at least 30 miles or something. I'll have to drop it off somewhere else locally. Maybe the next geocacher can do right by it.

Before we headed to the next cache, we decided to take a few miscellaneous pics.

The kiddos!

I really love this picture of me and my snookums!

Our last cache was a really tricky one. It was located by the Pantano Wash, but farther south. Luckily for us, we didn't have do down in the wash, like last time. We looked so long for this damn thing. All that was around were little bushes and dirt. And my GPS was telling me I was 0.0 feet from the cache coordinates! Nikki and the kids kept kicking this log around, picking it up and putting it down, kicking it, etc. I picked it up...

The sun was in our eyes.

Wow! This guy carved a hole in the log and jammed an altoids tin into it! There wasn't much inside since it was so small. And no wonder the coordinates were off. They were moving the log from it's original location, so when I was standing there, it was somewhere else. Geez...

We took some time to fool around and climb a tree. I'm a kid at heart, so I had to get in on the fun.  ;)

Yayyyyy!

Sarah, get that thing out of your mouth!

This is really good picture of Sarah.

"Honey, take the picture! Can't... hold on... much... longer...!"

We took the long way around (by mistake) when going back to the car. Skylar was really tired. She kept stopping and sitting down on the sidewalk. I wanted to hit some more caches, but we had to call it a day.

I'm considering starting another blog just to cover our geocaching exploits. We'll see...

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