Who Made This Mess?

The title just could not be resisted. No it is not the name of a cache, though it would be a good one. The micro’s and I met up with an online gamer friend of mine who had never geocached before. Always nice to do once you have gone through the initial opening questions/remarks of what is geocaching(?), you actually think that is fun(?) and what is the purpose(?). For these I generally refer them to geocaching.com because they answer those questions way more tactfully than I do! Lol!
So I’ve gone through the “orientation” with him online prior to our meeting. In this orientation he coins my now favorite phrase “Exploration Nerds”. My reply being, come cache with me and see how fun it is. So here we are. The cache is an easy one, on a path by a local library. I explain the machine to him (GC101, hehe), and off we go with the micro’s running ahead yelling stuff about caching back at him.
We arrive close to our destination, the point of gps spazz mode. At least that is what mine does when I get close. The navigational arrow can’t decide which way it wants to point and continuously change direction even while I’m standing still. There is a path off this path that one would not notice if not accustomed to looking for such things. The kids and I charge in, the noobfish peeks in nervously. Our clue was an old stump. And lo and behold, there it is about 4 feet off the main trail on the edge of a ravine.
I turn to my friend and say “Watch this”, (he is still not quite in off the main trail, lol). I walk up to the stump, which is almost as tall as I am, pull back a piece of bark that obviously does not belong with this tree (stiff bark on a western red, hahaha) and pull out the ammo box. I then turn and relish in the look on his face. Just like my kids when we first started caching. I call it the “deer in the cache-lights” look. As the kids are fighting over who gets to open the cache up (they are so anxious to trade crappy little toys, lol), noobfish says “I totally would have never know that was there!”. I then say, well, we wouldn’t want it muggled now would we. Oops, forgot to cover that in GC101, he looks confused. *Explains Muggling*
So we log our presence in the book, tuck all back in and I have noobfish rehide it. He still looks amazed. To this I say, now you have to go buy a gps and start up. To which he totally gets excited and starts talking about friends of his who he thinks do something like this and how he’ll have to hook up with them and do this some more. Ahh the smell of a new cacher. It’s refreshing isn’t it?

Oh the joys of bringing your children caching with you. We park at the suggested coords for the first cache of the day. As I punch in the coords for the actual cache, my younger two are clambering around the back of the mini-van (making it bounce up and down in the process making it not so easy to type in coords) searching for ” trades” since they left theirs at home. My oldest is sighing ever-so dramatically with her best bored face on (eye rolling included).
After those 2 minutes of excitement, everyone falls out of the sliding door into the middle of the street. No one steps on anyone or gets run over so we keep moving. We follow the “treasure finder” down the street to the cache which is in a fellow cachers yard. After looking at the clue (find the green circle) on my print-out, and my kids search every available green circle (including plants taking up a circular space). When we finally happen upon a green plastic round lid looking thing that looks like a city utility thing. The boys push and shove each other trying to get to the cache first. Again, no one maims themselves so we’re good.
It takes 5 minutes to get the cache out and to the nearby bench so we can dig out the log book and sign it. This is where I get to breathe. Once I wrestle the cache away from the kids long enough to nab the log-book, they sit around and ooh and ahh over the TB’s so I can log our find. After I log our find, it’s the struggle to decide which TB to move along and which to leave. Which means deciding between Curious George and Mickey Mouse. They peacefully (for once) decided on Curious George.
So I pack up the cache, the boys have since lost interest and are exploring the area. My daughter replaces it and we walk back to the cache-mobile the youngest falls off the curb and scrapes his knee. The sobbing commences (even though he’s not even bleeding), I quickly squinch them by saying that if he is that hurt then we have to go home and not find anymore cache’s. That makes the well of tears dry up instantly. We load up into the car and move onto the next cache a few blocks away.
This one goes by uneventfully, the kids take 10 minutes to decide what “trades” they want. Then the race back to the car is on, trying to keep them from falling in the pond located between the cache and the car. We tried for a 3rd cache after this, but there were too many muggles around, and the whining had hit the level of me sending everyone to their room so we called it a day.
Nothing like a day of caching with the kids….

i have at last decided upon opening a blog for my adventures. making it easier for others to share the joy and pain of sloshing through streams, balancing on logs and arranging new hairdo’s that include twigs sticking out at odd angle’s. i hope you all enjoy my rantings…..