Parking Lot Caching

Today was another absolutely GORGEOUS spring day in Columbus. The temp was near 80 degrees with a nice breeze and plenty of sunshine. Makes you want to put away the winter gear. Unfortunately there are predictions of snow by the end of the week. That's Spring in Ohio.

We spent a hectic (bordering on hellish) day at the zoo yesterday. The crowd and construction were overwhelming. Thankfully the company was grand!Today, we decided some low-key outdoor fun was in order. So we headed out to snag some quick park and go caches.

Here's Elf retrieving our first "target". And - it's actually at Target! Yuck, yuck. It was another tiny micro-cache hidden in the light. We felt like pros since we knew right where to look after finding another one like this last week. We signed the log and stuck a few tiny shells in the cache. I bought a bag of teeny shells for the little micros like these so that the next person has something to keep from even the smallest little caches.

We found another one up in the branches of a tree in another parking lot. That one took us about 10 minutes to find. It gave Elf and I a chance to work up a "story" in case anyone asked what we were doing. The story is we're homeschoolers working on a project. That or we just had to stop for an emergency diaper change for Taz. We figured either one should get rid of "muggles' pretty quick.

The last one was in the parking lot of an office complex. According to it's listing it was put there in view of the cache owner's office window so he could watch people look for it! Poor guy must have a boring job. We found it after a few minutes then all stood and waved at his window. It was too bright to see if he was there, but we did it anyway.

I had intended on one more stop, near a park with a playground. But Taz was getting cranky and I could tell nap time was coming. So instead we stopped at the Field of Corn that we passed on the way to the last cache. I remember the realtor showing me this while BG interviewed for the job that brought us to Columbus many years ago. I still find it just as humorous. Here are the kids in the field. They are either pretending to be caches or just trying to make me crazy. I choose to believe the former.

Oh, and for once I took a picture to prove I was actually there, too.

April Fool's Day

Despite dire predictions of rain from both the local forecast and weather.com, today is a gorgeous spring day in our neck of the woods. Speaking of woods, that's where we headed today. Into one of our beloved metro parks and about half a mile down on of the trails was our fourth find. See it? No? That's okay. Neither did any of the other non-cachers milling about this afternoon (geocachers refer to them as "muggles".) We wouldn't have seen it either unless we were looking for it (which, of course we were.) It was fun to try to look for the cache and nab it without anyone seeing us. We grabbed it and took it to a nearby bench for a look-see. Sneakiness isn't necessarily part of the game, but it's nice to try to keep the cache location safe so no one messes with it. Stealth is hard to achieve with Elf and Taz around. I thought maybe it would help if I explained to Elf why we needed to keep the caches safe. I told her about the muggle-thing. Being a Harry Potter fan I thought she'd get a kick out of it. She did, but I soon learned it may have been a mistake to share it with her. I asked her to be the lookout when I retrieved it and again when I returned it to it's home. Each time she insisted on yelling "Muggles!!" anytime anyone approached. She'll never work for the CIA.

This one had some neat stuff in it and I was glad that we brought some things with us to trade. Taz picked a toy saw and Elf and BG each grabbed a wooden nickel:

Here is a close-up of the wooden nickels. There was a whole bag of these that, according to the listing at Geocaching.com, were stocked by the cache owner this past January as rewards for finding it.

We left a beaded zipper pull and key chain like these, which I made last night, as well as some neat little shells in exchange for the stuff we took. According to what I've read, people often leave trinkets that reflect their interests, so it seems right that I should leave some hand-made stuff.

Also pictured is the bear hitchhiker with her travel bug attached that we picked up on Friday. We'll drop her off in a cache out of town later next week.

We saw some beautiful sites along the way. One of the coolest things being this snake:

I heard someone say it was a black rat snake. I'll take their word for it. All I know was that it was far enough away for it to be cool instead of scary. Now that we're home, it finally dawns on me that if there are snakes in the trees, it's a safe bet that there are snakes on the ground. Which means we are all wearing our hiking boots on future adventures. A snakebite is not a souvenir I want any of us to take home. Even if they're not poisonous, being bitten by one doesn't seem like much fun.

Here was something else we learned about:

And, despite what we learned last week about not caching when Taz is tired, we went today anyway even though we knew nap time was quickly approaching. He had fun, but asked BG to carry him on the way back and promptly fell asleep. Daddy had to carry the poor little dude half a mile back to the car, which resulted in this when we got home:


Another lesson learned. Next time we have to do anymore than the shortest amount of walking to find a cache, we MUST bring the kid-carrying backpack with us to schlep back anyone with worn out little legs.