Spring?

Anna and I finally got to go out Geocaching on Sunday. It was an absolutely beautiful day to get out and go hunting. A quick recap for those that don't know what Geocaching is:

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called "geocaches" or "caches") anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container containing a logbook and "treasure," usually toys or trinkets of little value.


We set out with GPS, cell phones, and our Geocaching bag which currently contains a small first aid kit, baby wipes for cleanup, hand sanitizer, a towel, spare batteries, and trinkets to put into the geocaches that we find. The first one on the list was very close to our house and we got to the area that the GPS wanted us to go to. But then after lots and lots of searching, we did not find it.

We moved on to the next on our list which was supposed to be a multi-stage cache. The posted coordinates contain not the geocache itself, but a clue or the actual location of the end point. It led us to downtown Mankato but we came up empty handed again. It seemed to want us to go into an abandoned building, which we know isn't right because these things are always on public property. We were disappointed when we could not figure it out so again, we moved on.

We drove over the river to North Mankato to a nice park. We quickly found the area the cache was supposed to be and had some ideas of where it was. We were not finding it at first, then Anna had an "ah-ha!" moment and found it! Since readers of this may want to go find it, I will not give away any details other than it was an extremely clever find.

The final stop on our list brought us to Hiniker Pond in North Mankato. We headed off in the direction the GPS was pointing us, but after awhile I got confused that we'd walked a couple hundred feet and the GPS didn't appear to have realized this. I then realized that I had the wrong thing punched into the unit, I punched in the correct coordinates and realized that our destination was 60 feet straight ahead. As we were approaching, I got a low battery warning and hoped we would find it in time before the batteries died.

Once again, Anna quickly found it and we wrapped up our day. 2 found, 2 not found. Not too bad for the first outing of the season. We can't wait to do more!