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.