A Brand New Adventure!

We are officially GeoCachers!

We printed off a few caches from geocaching.com and off we went. As I am an avid runner now, I own a Garmin 305 GPS running device that just happens to be rated a 4 out 5 as a geocaching device.

What fun. The gist of the whole thing is that it gets you off the beaten path and to places you wouldn't normally go. Normally we would just go for a drive and look at the sites, grab some lunch and then go home. Today we went for that drive, and on two occasions got out of the truck and were hiking in ankle deep slush and bushwhacking our way to the hidden treasures!

Our first Cache took us to the 'Big Rock' outside of Okotoks. We misunderstood this cache and found ourselves becoming frustrated that we couldn't find the hidden 'box or bag or whatever is hidden', but when we returned to the truck we re-read the sheet and realized it was a 'virtual' cache with the idea that it gets people out to see the 'Big Rock'. We were actually successful on our first cache but we ended up feeling a little disappointed anyway.

Well that all changed when we followed out GPS to the next one in High River. We tracked our way to George Lane Park in downtown HR and found ourselves outside a locked gate with 350 meters still to go to the supposed cache and nothing but snow and mud in that general direction. We go! We were pleasantly surprised when we realized the deepest snow carried our weight and was quite a nice walk. The GPS had us go into some pretty thick shrubbery until it just started to spin around not pointing anywhere. Traci had the GPS in her hand and said the unit must be wonky as its pointing everywhere. I told that meant that we had arrived at the coordinates. Andrew and I went around this big shrub and just as I started turning back toward her I heard her yell " Found it!" There it was. Our first real find! how freaking exciting! It was a camouflaged box wrapped in a dark plastic bag buried under a thick pile of brush.

Neat stuff. It was full of all kinds of trinkets and a log book which we signed as our first cache ever! YaY!

We added a little harmonica to the box, re-wrapped it and replaced it. We are so looking forward to this summer, during our camping trips, to go Geo-Caching all over the place. great. We got some fresh air with a purpose! The trip was really fun. We saw the 'Big Rock' up close which we never had before, and while driving around the country we saw 5 Bald Eagles in different places. (are they migrating?) One was even hovering on the wind 40 feet above a coyote, that obviously had a kill he was protecting. We ended up having these incredible coffees from this little place in High River and all in all it was a wonderful day!

Thank you Geo-Caching, we will become close friends I am sure! Traci is even planning a number of caches that we will place on our camping trips! Remember, Cache in - Trash out! Be a good person!