Even MORE geocaching!

As the summer vacation from school was coming to a close, I realized we had hardly done any geocaching all summer! While Dan was at Burning Man, I took the kids to some local trails for a hike, and mid-way through the hike, we realized there were probably a lot of geocaches hidden nearby (and we were right!). We were on a pretty limited time-frame, but looked for two and found three!

The first one we were staring right at without realizing until I finally decided to read the hint. Gotta love hints!

The second one was located on a part of the trail we'd already passed through, so we decided to hit it up on our way back to the car (so just continued exploring the trails for awhile and THEN headed back towards the car and the 2nd nearby cache). Based on the description, we were were pretty sure we knew where it would be located, and sure enough, we found this cutesy painted birdhouse, complete with a log book and some swag items.


As we were walking away, I accidentally hit the "photos" option of the geocaching app, and it took me to several pictures of other people holding up a totally different cache, near something entirely different than where were standing. Upon further exploration, we found the REAL geocache (Jared didn't want to be in this picture)


We are still pondering what the heck the bird house one was all about, because there were NOT two caches listed on the app that close together--we're talking maybe 10ft apart. We figure it was a nice two-for-one surprise! ha!

This past weekend, Dan and the boys were building stuff together, so Emily and I took Charlie and hit up another set of trails to do some geocaching. The bulk of the caches were hidden on a stretch of the trail that was pretty rough going in some places! I was glad we didn't have Connor with us...

Of the 7 caches hidden on the trails, we found 4 of them. Not bad!

One of our successes!


A few nearby to another one of our successes. This was a VERY old (HUGE) tree which fell down a long time ago. It was very splintered and twisted, and covered in moss, etc. It was really neat to see in person. Wish the picture did it justice!


The first cache we didn't find had us heading away from the main trail system and out along the main road (either that or down the REALLY steep embankment). Either way, we decided we didn't want to bother with it! The next cache we didn't find was another one we basically decided to skip. Best we could tell, we either had to bushwack through some pretty thick foliage, or walk in the stream to get nearer to it, and we didn't want to do either.

Here's Em at the stream we opted not to walk in!


The last cache we couldn't find drove me NUTS because the coordinates kept being so jumpy (due to the dense tree cover overhead). It would show us being really close, and then would suddenly jump and show us being 200-400ft away. So then we'd start backtracking and it would do it again. After turning around and backtracking several times, and considering we'd already been walking through the trails for close to two hours (there were a LOT of trails to wind through!), we were pretty tired and decided to go ahead and pass on that one as well. I always hate ending on a failure, but we were POOPED!