Caching

Grandpa introduced us to a fun new game today.....GeoCaching. It is not such a NEW game, really....a few of the boys have done it with Daddy a couple years back.....but it was all new to me and the girls. The game basically consists of hidden treasures located all over the US to which exact GPS coordinates are provided and can be viewed from online sites. We grab the coordinates, turn on our GPS device, and go hunting! Grandpa and my brother had found a "travel bug" last week while in Florida. These are never meant to be kept, but meant to "travel" around the country, their whereabouts tracked on the geocaching website. So our first project was to hide that travel bug somewhere in our little Minnesota town. It was our first cache of the day, found by Crispy and Jonny. We opened the "box", took an item, replaced it with another item, logged our visit in the little notebook, dropped in the travel bug, and merrily skipped along on our way to develop a geocaching agenda for the remainder of the afternoon.

We ended up searching for and finding 3 more today:

On a beautiful college campus, with LOTS of room for the kids to run

On a long abandoned railroad, now weed and tree forrest

And the other direction on before-mentioned abandoned railroad trail

We all had a lot of fun. The kids enjoyed finding the treasures, I enjoyed being out of my house and hiking around on this gorgeous day, as did Grandma and Grandpa. And Bob stayed home with the baby and relaxed back at the quiet house after a LONG and tiring week at work. It was just such a great activity for all of us involved. And after just this short introduction, I feel HOOKED on this new "game" and am looking forward to playing it again very SOON.