Exceedingly Mundane

Our niece Elizabeth has been staying with us some for the last couple of weeks, before she leaves for graduate school in the fall. We’ve really been glad to see her, and Chris too, before she has to leave. Last night, they came over for pizza and to hang out. We all had a lot of fun, and as it turns out, they turned into first-time geocachers!

We were telling them about geocaching, and trying to explain it, then Tim suggested that we all go do one close by, so we could let them try their hand at it. They’re good sports, so they agreed to give it a try 🙂 We went to a “micro” cache very close to our house that Tim and I had found before, and let Elizabeth and Chris practice with the GPS and information. They found it pretty quickly and seemed to enjoy it, so we all went back to the house and printed out 3 more caches close by, and downloaded the info into our GPS. Off we go, but it was getting close to dark and we were not able to find them all. Chris and Elizabeth did really good though, and found 3 out of 4. Of the two new ones that Tim and I had not tried to locate before, we found 1 of 2. Not too shabby for a couple of hours of fun and hanging out!

Check out the extended page for a couple of pictures of Elizabeth and Chris on their very first geocache 🙂

Here’s Elizabeth with our GPS, a Garmin Etrex Vista (yea, an old one!):

Chris and Elizabeth learn to use the GPS to pinpoint a place to search for a geocache:

Getting closer… closer… but hey, there’s nothing here, just a light pole:

After looking around a bit and with a little bit of coaxing, we discover…

Look, it slides up and inside is a small waterproof “match holder”, which in geocaching terms is a “micro cache”. A traditional cache is larger, like a small box or container and holds trinkets. Of no value, but fun to swap out and trade and move from place to place. A micro just has a sign-up sheet, to show that you found it:

This micro cache also contained a little surprise… I’m glad it was Elizabeth and not me opening it when she found the lizard:

Unfortunately, after we went back to our house after this cache and I downloaded and printed out 3 more caches for us to search for – I left my camera at home on the desk! Tim had his Razr phone with him, but it doesn’t take nearly as good of pictures. I wish I had brought mine, so I could have gotten more pictures of Chris and Elizabeth geocaching. 🙂 Here’s the last cache we went to, one that Tim and I had found before, it’s a night cache and you’re meant to go at night to see this:

This is another blog entry in itself… a local thing that we like to laugh about! If you don’t live around here and would like to guess what it is, go right ahead! For those of you from this area, I know you know what this is!