Caching In...

I've read about geocaching in family/kids magazines, but this is the first year we've ever done it. It all started with their first geocache find at a boy scout campgrounds. The idea of trading getting new tchotcke items was a definite plus for the kids. They love tchotcke items. Of course, they knew they have to do trade-sies. Since then we tried about seven geocache locations using our auto gps device to guide us. We were successful with three of them. The first two we tried we didn't really take much note of the hints and relied mostly on the coordinates which was difficult when the gps kept switching satellites on us and seemed to take us in two different directions. Needless to say we didn't find those two. We had better luck on the next two. The first success was celebrated by the kids with a hearty 'I found it!' However, the cache was located in an area with quite a few muggles about. So we had to the instruct the kids to be more discreet the next time. The picture above is of a quick getaway after restoring the second geocache we had found. Pretty discreet, huh? Well, as discreet as can be with a group of us searching around and dawdling about. The next one we found was a microcache. The microcache didn't quite excite the kids as much since all we did was write our handle in the log, but they had fun looking for it none the less. E actually found it in the trunk of a tree...a crud covered looking little bottle...eww gross (his words)... it sure blended in well with the tree. Finding these geocaches are not as easy as I had imagined. In my imagination I pictured a 100% success rate. I would guess that our success rate would be better if we had an upgrade in technology, perhaps a mobile phone with better data capabilites and an 'app for that.' In the meantime, the searching is half the fun.