Our First Geocaching Experience....(photo essay)

Since we own a couple of GPS units, we thought we'd try Geocaching. Angela belongs to the 4H geocaching club at school, and she's asked and asked us to go. Being at my inlaws in Minnesota for over week seemed like the perfect time to try it out.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about....

Geocaching is an outdoor activity 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 (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook. Larger containers can also contain items for trading, usually toys or trinkets of little value. Geocaching is most often described as a "game of high-tech hide and seek".

 We decided to try one close to Mike's parents' house first....but it was a lot further away than we thought. That was one long walk. Of coarse, none of them will look up at me.

We took the long route around for this first one....but it's a learning experience. It was an ammo box.

This next one was neat, and thankfully easy to locate.

It's fun to see what kind of items happen to be in the container. We brought all kinds of little trinkets and coins to trade. Of coarse, each cache has a logbook....and yes, I'm the one that always ends up signing the log.

The 'treasure' Angela got from this one....The caches in Minnesota spoiled her I think.

I discovered this one first....isn't it neat?

And no, the birds can't get in it....

On the way to a cache called "Tile Trash", we saw all kinds of animal footprints in the mud.

 Deer

Wolf or coyote perhaps....it was twice the size of Maggie's paws. And yes, we did take Maggie with us.

This one is a Rubbermaid storage container. We found our first travel bug in this one.

I think we found 4 that first day in Red Wing. Then later that evening, we found a few in Lake City with Mike's brother and family. They had never heard of geocaching...so we went in the rain. We were still too new at it to really know what we were doing or what to look for. After not being able to find a couple, I finally got on line and realized we were looking for very small caches (micros and nanos). Oops. Mike never looked at the sizes when he downloaded coordinates. We were just lucky that most of what we looked for were big ones.