Current mood:	happy
Entry tags:	daily life, family, geocaching

Geocaching!
I went geocaching with woofiegrrl today and all I can say is that I never thought looking for Tupperware® could be so much fun! Although, it's possible the company I was with had something to do with that! ;-)

woofiegrrl had been geocaching before, so she did the research and found several pretty close to where I live.

We stopped at the nearby rest stop on I-95 to start and found the cache hidden there pretty easily. After that, things got more interesting....

The rest of the caches we went looking for -- and found! -- were in Savage Park off the Wincopin Neck trails. The thing about geocaching is that it can be reasonably easy to get to the general location, but then finding a small plastic box that's somewhere near you, but may be under branches, in a hole in a tree or anyplace else that isn't obviouscan be more difficult than it sounds. We found one hidden next to a tree concealed by branches, a second in a fallen tree, a third under a rock pointed to by another rock (that one should have been easier to find, except because we weren't getting very good GPS signals, North kept jumping around!), and a final one under a cairn of stones.

By the time we had gotten back to the car, we'd both gotten in a nice walk and had a lot of fun (at least I did!) I was really surprised how fast time went. We took time for lunch before woofiegrrl had to head home.

The only disappointing part was seeing the crap that some people leave in the caches. If you take something out of the cache, you're supposed to leave something of equal value. These are all trinkets — nothing of any real monetary value. But, come on ... golf balls? A very faded Santa Pez dispenser? A bumper sticker for a "family-friendly" radio station? woofiegrrl did find a nice Tai-Shan keychain and a little wooden "geocoin" with no obvious means of tracking it (i.e. no number, website, etc.). It did have the initials of W.F. (I think) on it on one side and an image of Maryland with the geocaching symbol stamped over it (the symbol is used for the letter "G" in the mdgps.org site). She left some stuffed NeoPets in trade. Unfortunately, I didn't see anything that really interested me, so the only souvenir I have is the mud on my boots.

But that's OK, 'cause I had enough fun to make up for the lack of any tchotchkes!