Our Adventure Geocaching

I wrote a little the other day about Geocaching and our less than successful day at trying to complete our first GeoChallenge...But then Tuesday we were invited by our dear friends, the Greens, to accompany them for an afternoon of assured success going geocaching. They've been doing this for years and have a couple dozen or more cache finds under their belts. All we needed was a little help in learning what to look for and Jenn and her two boys, JJ and Shane, were confident they could be our guides and get us heading in the right direction.

Jenn has the Geocaching app on her iPhone which is a huge help. It pulls up your current location and then pinpoints nearby caches, giving brief descriptions of what to look for and how difficult each cache might be to find regarding the terrain and how well they're hidden.

Our first find was originally hidden by Jenn at the end of their lane, so that was a fairly easy cache for us newbies. Inside the coffee container is a bunch of little toys, called swag, that you can choose an item from and in exchange leave a new small trinket for someone else to claim when they find the cache. Michael thought this was incredible fun--real life treasure hunting!

 Swapping out the swag

After locating our first cache, we piled in Jenn's car and headed to the Butler Freeport Historic GeoTrail, where twenty historical caches have been hidden along the twenty-one mile long trail, as well as many other independent caches are also hidden. Here we found four more caches!

 Coyles Station-a historic cache. All our other finds were independent caches.

 JJ found A Bug's Life

 My first find!! New Years 'O9--this was a toughie!

 Shane found Playdoh Anyone?

 A mug shot from the boys

 Not a cache, but an awesome trail dog find! He loved the boys but was leary of us adults...

Heading home after a successful afternoon's adventure in geocaching!

So now that we're more in tuned about what to look for when we're out geocaching, Bug and I most certainly will give adventuring on our own another shot--and look forward to more hunting fun with friends as well!! Check out the Geocaching website and no doubt you'll find caches hidden almost in your backyard. Grab a few coordinates, grab the kids and your GPS and give it a try! You never know what you might find!