Sunday Caching :)

What a GORGEOUS weekend we’ve had!!!! Both yesterday and today, the high reached 65*!!!! Finally!!!! After weeks of horrible, awful, actual WINTER weather, we had a nice respite from the cold and dreary. Needless to say, this meant that it was perfect caching weather!!!!

Saturday, the GeoTeens and I all had eye doctor appointments from 10:20 to 1:00 (three of us, one after the other…fun times). I figured after the eye doc appointments, we’d go on and get some caches found. What I forgot about, however, that this was the appointment where they dilated my eyes…. and I also forgot that it takes 5 to 6 hours for that dilation to wear off and go back to normal. Fun times… or not – LOL! After we got our eyes checked, and glasses (GeoTeens) and contacts (me) ordered, I drove home and stayed put in a nice, dark room for the rest of the afternoon till I could see again. My vision finally went back to normal around 5:30… and by then, there wasn’t enough daylight left to find much, so I opted to go grocery shopping instead.

Today being Sunday, of course we all went to church this morning. After church (which was all kinds of awesome, by the way!), we got some lunch and ran to the store for a couple things. Finally, at 3:30 this afternoon, the GeoKidz and I made our escape!!! We had four caches on our list to find today.

The first one was a cemetery cache that we’ve tried to find two or three times before without any luck. It was this first cache that was, quite literally, our first cache attempt ever, on or about December 18. The GeoTeens and I went there with my car GPS, my TomTom, and tried to find this one. No luck at all, though we trampled about the cemetery for probably close to a couple hours! This was the one that got us hooked on caching, simply because we knew the durn thing was there somewhere, but we couldn’t find it. This is the one that prompted me to ask Santa Hubby for a GPS for Christmas. Well, long story short, after I got my Magellan for Christmas, we’ve been back a couple times to try to find this one, with no luck. Today, I was determined that we’d find it, and, thankfully, we did! Or rather, my nine-year-old GeoGirl did (as usual, LOL). I was off poking around in an area we always looked every time (because, you know, it just might miraculously appear out of nowhere if I look just one more time!), while she was using her finely-tuned geosense to actually find the thing. It was one of those “facepalm” moments when you realize, “Ohhhhhhh….THERE it is! Duh…how could I have missed it????” Ahem. Oh well… we found it, much to our delight, and moved on to our second cache of the day.

Cache Number Two was a micro, also a location that we’ve previously tried to find. This time, we were still unsuccessful. It’s supposed to be relatively easy, pretty much a park-n-grab (though not under a lamppost). However…. the little varmint remained well-hidden. Curses! Foiled again! I pass this place twice a day, every day, and I swear that cache is mocking me each time I drive by. It’s my geo-nemisis…. but one day…one day, I’ll get you, my pretty! (insert maniacal cackling here).

Eventually, we gave up after about an hour, and wandered on to Cache Number Three of the day. This was a pretty easy find…again found by my GeoGirl (of course – LOL). This one was actually laying out in the open more or less… it hadn’t been covered up very well, or had been uncovered and was quite exposed. After signing the logbook and swapping trinkets (and dropping in a travel bug), we re-covered it and made sure it was well-hidden. We had an almost-Muggle encounter while we were in the woods on this one. The kids and I were poking around with our walking sticks, when suddenly another family entered the woods…mom, dad, three kids and a baby in a stoller. We thought for sure that they must be geocaching, too… otherwise, why would they be in the woods????? Turns out, they had simply had dinner at the a restaurant in the shopping strip we were behind, and were just walking home. Golly… you mean, people do things OTHER than geocache??? Really? Wow.

We still had plenty of daylight left after finding this one, so we added one more on our list of things to find. Cache Number Four would possibly have been our first, First to Find, IF hubby hadn’t taken my car GPS when he went to the Falcon’s playoff game a couple weeks back. I have my Geocaching account set up to notify me of any brand-new caches once they are published, and this one was only 2.7 miles from me. But, I had no hope of finding it without my GPS, especially at night (plus, I was tired, that was the day of my day-long caching adventure), so I just let it go. But it was still on my list of things to find ASAP, and we did. OK, OK… the GeoGirl found this one, too. But only because she runs faster than me and got there first. Really. Honest. It was cool to see that this was our fourth cache of the day, and we were the FOURTH to find. OK, not quite first, but what the heck, I’ll take it.

Arrived home shortly after 5, swept off the driveway (it was buried under weeks of pinestraw… I thought pine trees were supposed to be EVERGREENS??? What’s with all the shedding????) and then took GeoTeen1 back to walmart for some school supplies I forgot to get yesterday for her.

And here we are… finally home and about to get settled in for the night. All in all, it was an excellent day! We are so blessed to go to such an excellent church (there are many excellent churches in Loganville… I really (heart) this one a lot)…it really started the day off right. (I almost typed “rite” LOL – wrong synonym, but appropriate, LOL!). Lunch was yummy, geocaching was fun, and all is right with the world. At least, my little corner of it.

Have a good night y’all… Monday’s a’comin’…. batten down the hatches and brace yerselves!

A wonderfully wander-full day!

Today was our first-ever day that was entirely devoted to geocaching, from start to finish.  The GeoKidz and I were up and out the door by 9:30 a.m. (!!!!) We stopped by Dunkin Donuts for breakfast (the most important meal of the day, you know!) and were on our way.

Our first cache of the day was a large one – it was a ten-gallon bucket! Lots of neat stuff in there! It was not quite six miles from home.  I’d originally planned on this one to be later in the day, until I read that there were several travel bugs residing in that bucket, just waiting to be carried away to new adventures! Since we had a LONG day planned of wandering far & wide, this was a MUST.  🙂 We found the cache easily (kinda hard to miss, hehe!) and left with three travel bugs (and of course, we left other trinkets in their place).

Next stop on the list: Rutledge, Georgia! Had never heard of the place before today, but put the coordinates in the GPS, and away we went! This was one of a series of Historical Georgia Multi-Caches, and the first multi-cache we’d ever attempted.  The idea is that you go to the published coordinates, then look for clues listed in the cache description (in  these cases, the clues were the various years of certain events) to figure out the coordinates of the actual cache location.  I can’t say, of course, where this first one (or any of them, really) took us, but I loved it! Now that I think about it, I wish we’d taken more time to explore that particular spot while we were there! *sigh* Oh well.

The next two caches were in or near Mansfield, GA – yes, another town I’d never heard of, LOL! Can’t describe these two, either, without giving away the final answers of the cache location. But, suffice it to say, Mansfield is another neat, neat little historical town.  Oh, and it’s also The Town Of Awesome BBQ!!!! Seriously. In between caches 2 and 3, we stopped for lunch at this tiny little hole-in-the-wall place, Where There’s Smoke BBQ. Definitely a bit of local flavor, both figuratively and literally. 😀  It. was. AWESOME! Both kids pronounced it to be the BEST LUNCH EVER in the history of the UNIVERSE! hehehe.  If you are ever geocaching or otherwise traveling thru or near Mansfield, EAT THERE! You totally won’t regret it. 😀

After our Mansfield stops, we wandered on a piece till we came to Bostwick, Georgia. (insert the “never-hear-of-it-before-till-now” sentence here!) This may well have been my favorite town of the day.  Absolutely quaint, oozing with history all over the place.  I absolutely adore old, historical buildings (my big goal in life is to live in a historical, antebellum home one day), and this was one neat little town. 🙂  The cache we were after almost didn’t get found… we found the location very, very easily, but were almost foiled by a “muggle” (non-geocacher) who was reading her newspaper literally right on top of the geocache. Like, literally, right on top of it. *rolling eyes*  We wandered around the area some, kinda hoping that the presence of small kids would kinda disrupt the wonderfully serene atmosphere she was enjoying.  No such luck.  We went back to the van, where I called hubby to check in with him.  As I hung up the phone, poof! Muggle-lady got up and left!!!!! Just like that.  Good thing I’d paused to call hubby… otherwise, we would have left and chalked it up to a disappointing “did not find.”  We jumped out of the van and ran over to the place it was hiding, where my daughter found it in no time flat! The hint in the cache description told us exactly where it was, LOL, so we didn’t even need GPS for this one. Sign, re-hide, and back to the van we went….just as Ms. Muggle was returning from wherever she disappeared to. Seriously???? On a 40-degree, windy day, it’s comfortable enough to sit outside and read a paper for a few hours??? Really? Okee dokee then…moving right along… 😉

We had just one more historical multi-cache on our list for the day in this general area.  However, the muggle-watching had eaten up some valuable time. It was now 3:30, and daylight would be fading fast before too long (by 6).  We were just a tad bit over an hour away from home, and there were two traditional ammo box caches we wanted to find near Loganville, our home town.  So, we nixed the last one (another one back in Rutledge – somehow I failed to group it together with the OTHER Rutledge ones… oh well!) and headed back towards the ‘Ville.

The next cache on our list…. was a Did Not Find.  It actually turned into a Did Not Attempt, because the GPS coordinates landed me in the middle of a residential neighborhood…and it was SUPPOSED to put me in a local park!  I’ve noticed that with any Tribble Mill Park cache I’ve tried to find, the coordinates always put me in one of the nearby swanky neighborhoods.  :::facepalm::: I know when I land in a neighborhood,  I need to just tell my GPS to find Tribble Mill Park and go from there, haha. (I do not know ahead of time WHAT park I’m going to…just that it’s “a” park… and any neighborhood I land in has always been very close to Tribble Mill, so… I’m sensing a theme here, LOL.)  By this time, it was  closing in on 5:00.   Tribble Mill is a pretty big park (love love LOVE it there!) and I didn’t feel like there was enough daylight left to safely start wandering thru to find this cache.

There was ONE more in our list of caches we wanted to find, but that one didn’t work out either…my car GPS put me not quite where it should have,and with it being so late, I didn’t want to risk wandering around any longer than I had to.  So, the GeoKidz and I called it a day and headed home.

All in all, it was a solid, full day of geocaching – over 100 miles, round trip.  We found all the ones we actually looked for, and weeded out three that there just wasn’t time for.  If this was warmer weather, we would have left much earlier in the day and been able to find one or two more..but I wanted to wait till the roads started to thaw out a bit before we left home.  😀  Most of the ice is gone, but there are still icy patches and black ice scattered about.  I figured a later start would be the smarter idea.  Goal: 8. Found: 5. Of the three travel bugs we picked up in the morning, we found new homes for two of them along the way.  One remains in my care until I can sneak out and send him back on his journey. 😉 I’d call that a pretty successful day of hunting!

Dinner at a local restaurant (Claude’s Off the Bayou – YUM!) and a quick trip to Kroger to get some groceries finished up our long, fun day. 😀 😀

Hope everyone enjoys the rest of their weekend!

FINALLY Escaped!!!!!

At long last, the temperature climbed high enough above the freezing mark to thaw out most of the ice on the roads…. THANK GOD! (Which I mean quite literally, btw!) As I mentioned earlier, I did not go to work today.  A large part of the reason was that I was simply too traumatized by my commute from the ice-induced 7th level of Hell yesterday…. horrible nightmare, that.  3.25 hours TO work, then work for three hours, then over 3.5 hours HOME.  Seriously. I was really ready to go postal by the time I got home, haha.  Fortunately, today my two oldest kids, the GeoTeens, were leaving for a church youth retreat at 1:00, leaving me babysitterless for the day.  One day of  full daycare would cost almost as much as a whole week of before & after care; the lady we usually use as a backup is in a neighborhood full of twists and turns and hills and such along the route from here to there (refer to the aforementioned state of traumatized-ness resulting from my commute yesterday).   None of my attorneys were planning on being in the office anyway, so I used up a vacation day with their blessing. 🙂 Have I mentioned, I (heart) the attorneys I work for?? They are awesome! 🙂

After dropping the GeoTeens off at church, the GeoKidz and I returned home.  By this time, the ice on the roads was vanishing fast, and I finally felt safe enough to venture out on a quick cache hunt. 🙂 I fiddled around with Geocaching.com and my GPS, and figured out how to download “Pocket Queries” to my GPS, and upload my log entries to Geocaching.com. 😀 Major accomplishment for techno-challenged me! 😉  I then planned out a route of four or five local caches we would attempt to find.  We found three.

The first cache was a simple lamp-post skirt hide.  The GeoKidz had not been with me when I found previous lamp-post caches; they were fascinated with the idea that the square box part of the lamp-post actually can be MOVED and lifted up! Who knew, right?! 😉

From there, we wandered to a local park, one I’ve been to many times (it’s actually one of my most favorite places to go jogging, because the track around the football field is nice and FLAT!).  This one required that we veer off the paved path and wander in the woods for a short while.  Obviously, this one was much more challenging than the lamp-post find!  While the snow was mostly gone from the roads and such, there was still a TON of it on grassy areas and… in the woods.  No traffic (car or foot traffic) to help speed along the melting.  This meant that everything pretty much looked exactly alike. My GPS sometimes gets a little iffy if there is heavy tree cover.blocking its signal.  I’m still learning how to read and interpret its various moods and such, haha.  We spent a good bit of time wandering around, poking at the ground with sticks.  About a thousand times, my kids were POSITIVE they’d found it… only to discover that they had, in fact, found a perfectly wonderful tree root/stump/rock/miscellaneous pile of leaves.  Eventually, I found it purely and completely by accident.  Yay! 🙂 This was definitely the most accidental find I’ve had so far, though, haha! We signed the logbook and deposited some swag trinkets and a GeoCoin before heading on our way.

Our next stop was supposed to be one near a local bowling alley. I’ve wanted to find this one forever (like, all three or four weeks I’ve been geocaching! Seriously, forever! haha). This one was foiled by a good amount of ice that made the area it was hidden in dangerous… that, and a muggle (a/k/a, “non-geocacher who has no idea what we are doing”) who was watching us intently, and then got on his cell phone while watching us intently.  Although geocaches are only placed somewhere with express permission from the property owner, I still didn’t feel like having my first possible encounter with the police thinking I was behaving suspiciously, haha.  So, the GeoKidz and I left there, and marked that one as one to return to when the ice has vanished. 🙂

By this time, the day was winding down, and daylight would be fading fast soon.  I nixed the other cache or two I’d had on my list, and chose instead another lamp-post skirt hide to find, just to end the day on a positive note.  We drove, we lifted, we signed, we replaced, we left. 😉

We finally arrived home shortly after 5:00. I ordered pizza and began plotting our adventures for tomorrow.  Hubby has to work all day, followed by him attending the Falcons’ first playoff game (unless he found someone to buy his ticket…he wants to trade up his Christmas gift (the ticket) for a nicer TV for our room. Go figure, LOL!).  The GeoTeens are not home until Sunday afternoon, and thus the GeoKidz and I are free to wander as we please for the whole day. 🙂

We are going to start off with a large cache about six miles from us.  It has several travel bugs residing in it.  The plan is to grab a few travel bugs, then begin our wandering.  There is a series of historical multi-caches that a local guy has put together that I’ve been just dying to go find. I adore history (with my Greatx3 Grandfather having fought in the Civil War for the 34th GA Infantryand my ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War for the Americans… both were POWs, both were wounded in war, both survived and lived happily ever after, how can I not love history??? It’s in my blood, literally! Yep, history is COOL!) Anyway, I’ve selected a few caches to get started on that are a bit of a drive from where we live.  I figure we’ll find a few of those, then work our way back towards Loganville.  This will be the first time I’ve attempted a multi-cache.  With a multi-cache, you are given the coordinates to the first stage of the cache.  The actual cache itself is not there, but there are clues there to help you figure out the coordinates to where the cache itself is. 🙂 So you go to stage one, then on to stage two (or three or however many there are).  The ones I picked are simple two-stage caches that hopefully will not drive me TOO crazy! I need to find at least one of the critters to make the drive worth it. 😉 We aren’t wandering horribly far, closer than I commute to work, but so far we haven’t been farther than six miles or so… so this counts as “adventure” in my book! Plus, I’ve never been to these particular areas before, so that definitely counts as “adventure!”

I’m sure there’s no way we’ll actually find ALL the ones I picked out for tomorrow (8 or 9 of them), but it’s at least a rough plan to go by.  The adventure is in the journey and the wandering, not in the checking off things on a list. 🙂 We’ll find what we can, and attack the rest another day.

And now I must sign off and do those much more mundane, less fun things like trying to straighten up this catastrophe of a house, and convince hyper GeoKids that bath and bed times are really NOT the End of the Universe As We Know It. 😉

Happy Friday all! May your weekend be a stupendously fabulous one!

 

 

Snowpocalypse 2011 is still in full swing!

I finally got brave enough to sneak outta my house today to attempt this “work” thing again, LOL. Wow, what a NIGHTMARE that was!!! Much of Hwy 78 was OK, but once you got into/past Snellville, the nightmare began and it was horrible! North Druid Hills Road = Horrible, 85S = EXTREMELY Horrible, 75 N, mostly OK; Northside Parkway, not so much, at least not right by where my office was. Left home at 9:45 a.m., got to work at 1:05 PM. Worked until 4:00. Left at 4:00 ON THE DOT. Got home at 7:45 PM.     Nope, I’m not doin’ THAT again tomorrow! No way, no how, nuh-uh!!!!!!!! Likely I’ll be working over the weekend and on Monday, which is fine by me, since everything will be nice & melted by then.   Sheesh…. Not a good day at all. The highlight of the day was walking in the office door, just as the catered lunch was delivered for those hardy (insane) souls who braved (were crazy enough to go out in) the elements to get there, LOL. Free food = WIN. 😉 Hopefully in between working and such, I’ll be able to sneak in a cache or two. 😉 Carry on!

Snowpocalypse is Here!

Wow, for once, the weathermen’s dire predictions of impending doom in the guise of a ton of snow were….RIGHT!!!! There are several inches on the ground… it’s gorgeous out there! The kids are all outside, playing in the snow and turning into kidsicles, LOL.  Me, I’m curled up in bed reading a book. Oh wait, I just finished one… I WILL BE reading a new book once I pick one out from my stack-o-books to read. 😀

My office is actually CLOSED for the day, which never happens.  Likewise, hubby’s office is actually CLOSED for the day, which also never happens.   Yep, they weren’t kidding when they said it was really going to snow – it actually did! Good thing I caved in and went to the store yesterday, even though I really didn’t feel like it, LOL!

Too cold, icy, and COLD to get any geocaching done.  I was kinda hoping the weather would be just bad enough to merit a snow day, but not so bad as to keep me locked away inside all day. Usually, it’s bad in the morning, but conditions improve as the day goes on.  Nope, not this time! Conditions are worsening and will continue to worsen as the day goes on.  Now wishing I’d bought more hot chocolate at the store yesterday, LOL!

Ah well…it is a very good, lazy day nonetheless.  Back to my pile-o-books, my blankies, and my big comfy pillows. 🙂

Cache Dash at the Georgia Geocacher’s Association Meeting

Happy Sunday evening, everyone! Greetings from my home office here in Loganville, where I sit and wait for the first Snowpocalypse of 2011 to arrive.  Already, schools are shutting down, the attorney I work for went into the office today and took a slew of work home with her, just in case, and you could get rich by auctioning off a loaf of bread or jug of milk, as the grocery stores are madhouses of panicked stampedes and nearly-empty shelves. Yep.  We just might get one to three inches.  Maybe.  If you live in the mountains, well, then, you might get up to six inches. A single flake, or the thought of a single flake (of the snow variety) is enough to create widespread panic here in good ole Georgia, hehe.   Of course, the real danger is in the icy roads that accompany or follow snow.  Down here, snow doesn’t often stick… it lands, melts, and then, when temps drop overnight, freeze to a lovely but deadly sheet of slick, black ice.  And chaos ensues.

As I sit here, I am also wondering if it’s worth the effort to hobble alll the way into the other room waaaaayyyy over there to get more Advil for my wimpishly sore muscles.  Yesterday, the GeoTeens and I drove down to Callaway Gardens for the January meeting of the Georgia Geocacher’s Association (of which I am now a full-fledged member – yay!).  Of course, directionally-challenged as I am, we ended up spending about 30 minutes or so LOST, driving around in the wrong part of Callaway Gardens… I’d gone in the wrong entrance and circled the cottages for what seemed to be forever, lol.  (Hey, I told you at the beginning I’m highly geographically challenged! I was so not kidding, nor exaggerating! haha!) Eventually, we landed in the right place, got signed in, got some coffee, and went outside to participate in the Cache Dash.

The Cache Dash was a four-mile hike through the Gardens, with a list of  coordinates for six different caches we had to find along the way.  There were also bonus objects we had to be on the lookout for.  Whoever had the lowest score at the end (time it took to complete the course, minus the bonus points you accumulated) was the winner.  Well, we definitely did not win, LOL! I was more worried about the whole “finding caches and not getting lost” part of it all, and had completely overlooked the (obvious) fact that this was, in essence, a race.

The last time I did any distance walking and/or jogging was probably close to three months ago now…when you factor in work, the lingering bronchitis/cough, etc… this was the first time I’ve been out exercising in a long time.  I had thought to myself, “well, it wasn’t long ago when I was doing 8 and 10 miles walks – 4 should be a breeze!” Um, yeah, I was soooo dead wrong about that!  haha!  They kindly paired us up with another, more experienced couple… um, a SUPER-FAST, more-experienced couple.  I was going top speed for me (which isn’t very fast, even though I was giving it 100% lol) and still was BARELY able to keep pace with them.  I’m pretty sure they would have won and/or done much better if not for pokey old me. Sorry, team mates!!!!

Anyway, the cache dash itself was AWESOME! I actually found the first cache (yay!).  Which was good, because that was the only one I found the whole time, hehe. Usually the other couple had it found and were signing the log by the time I managed to catch up with them (cringing in shame, again).  Boy, was it an adventure! Over the river (ok, really a lake/creek) and thru the woods, down a steep hill, over dead trees, under branches, thru vines, up hills (and those of you who follow my jogging/running exploits know how much I LOVE hills… they are in the same category as early mornings and Mondays, hehe!).  Even so, I was having too much fun to let a hill or two dampen the moment. 🙂 Callaway Gardens is BEAUTIFUL! It wasn’t the leisurely stroll I’d thought it would be, but we still saw plenty of scenery.  It was a picture-perfect day, too – not a cloud in the sky, temps in the 40s – a crisp, clear, PERFECT day for caching or anything else.  My son brought his Nintendo DSi with him and used that to take pics.  If we can ever figure out how to upload them to the computer, I’ll post some for you. 🙂 If we accidentally delete them in the process, then, well, sorry. ha!

My favorite cache of the day was actually the last one.  It seemed to take us forever to find the durn thing.  I stood at the edge of a very dense thicket of trees and bushes and vines and stuff, and my GPS said I was within 3 feet of the cache. (I should note here that every other cache had been your traditional regular-sized ammo box type, so of course, we were thinking this would be too.)  But, we couldn’t find it. I was stabbing the ground with my walking stick, listening for the hollow thunk-thunk that would tell me I hit an ammo box or other container.  The other couple was doing the same thing.  I tried to lean in as far as I could to the thicket, but didn’t get very far.  Finally, my 15 year old GeoTeen, Jacob, said, “I’m going in!” I handed over the GPS and my walking stick, and he fought his way thru.  We were yelling directions, “Come over this way more!” and he’d say, “What way??? I can’t see you!” Of course, we couldn’t see him, either… that thicket was THICK.  He’d fought his way about two-thirds through it when one of the other folks had the proverbial light bulb go off in her mind. 🙂 Something about the cache name made her think it might be hidden in some kind of hollowed out log or something.   And, indeed it was!  Worse yet, it was RIGHT THERE in front of us the whole time. We’d been over it, on it, around it, heck, I’d even leaned over it multiple times, trying to tap the ground on the other side of it! :::facepalm:::  Her hubby reached in that log, found the green tubular cannister, and there ya go – mystery solved!  Of course, at this point, my poor son was still stuck in the middle of that durn thicket and had to fight his way back out again, hehe.  Poor lilll fella!

Another memorable moment is while we were looking for this last cache, a lady walked by on the path with her pet…. vulture.   Yep, pet vulture.  We have photographic evidence!  He was very curious about what we were doing – walked over to our area and chattered at us as we were searching.  At first I thought it was a turkey, but turkey’s aren’t 100% black feathered, and he didn’t have a comb thingy or a gobbler thingy on his beak/head.  Then I thought it was a really big crow, until I realized that they don’t make crows THAT big, haha.  The lady told us it was a vulture.  She called him and he waddled back over to her, and ate some treats from her hand, haha.

We then raced back to the starting point (and yes, I actually did RUN the last little bit there!) and finished the course.  While I have great memories of the whole day and had a blast, the memories that stand out most are that last cache that was hidden in plain sight, my poor son stuck in the thicket, and the pet vulture, hehe.  It was great!

And now you know why I’m eating Advil like it was candy, haha, and am soooo sore EVERYEWHERE! My ARMS are even sore because of the reaching/climbing/leaning on my walking stick, haha.  We escaped relatively unscathed.  I fell twice during our adventure – once on a tree root in the path, and once on a vine that sneakily wrapped itself around my boot.  No harm done, I fall all the time and am used to it. 😉 My  GeoTeen daughter (17) did find one ginormous hole that was covered up in leaves.  It LOOKED like solid ground, till stepped into it and it swallowed her up to her thigh!  She escaped the hole and kept on for the rest of the hike.  Once she stopped moving after it was all over though, and the adrenaline faded out, her ankle started hurting her and still hurts today.  She probably has a bit of a sprain, but it’s not anything too severe.  A nice little ankle brace is doing the trick and she’ll be OK.  My son never fell (I think he was the only one of our group who didn’t at some point!) but he forgot to wear his knee braces yesterday, and his tendinitis is bugging him today.  Needless to say, he’s got his knee braces on now!

Anyway, after the cache dash was over, we enjoyed a big bowl of super-yummy chili and watched a presentation on solving puzzle caches. I haven’t attempted a puzzle cache yet (never been much of a puzzle person to begin with) but will one of these days.  Some of those puzzles are positively evil, LOL!!!!

After the meeting was over, the GeoTeens and I piled back in the van for our 2 & 1/2 hour ride back to Loganville (with a stop at a Walgreens along the way for some Epsom salts, some IcyHot, and a few other things).  When we got back to Loganville at about 6:30 p.m., we stopped by the local Chinese food place and picked up dinner for hubby and the two little GeoKids waiting at home (and dinner for us, too!).

After dinner and the very best hot shower I’ve ever had, I completely crashed into an exhausted heap and slept like a rock. 🙂

Thank you to all who made the Cache Dash and GGA meeting so awesome!!! I’m so glad we went and am looking forward to participating in more events in the future.  🙂

Now, where’s that Advil….?

Of GeoCoins and Traffic Stops

Howdy, everyone!  Here it is, finally Thursday.  The weekend is almost here!!!! Very excited about this weekend.  The GeoTeens and I are attending our first-ever meeting of the Georgia Geocachers’ Association on Saturday.  The event is taking place at Callaway Gardens – a place I’ve always wanted to visit but have never been to.  There is, of course, a geocache hunt before the meeting, and there’s food, too.  It’s looking to be a full day!!!  Nervous (I have the social skills of a hermit) but excited too.  Hoping to connect with another geocacher or twelve who know what they are doing and can help us out. 🙂

Anyway, due to my insanely long commute and the limited amount of daylight available during the winter (not to mention the whole “feeding and caring for four kids, two cats and a dog” thing), my geocaching is limited to weekends.  And, given that my weekends are insane, limited to a tiny portion of the weekends, at that.  That’s why I’ve only got five finds so far. Honest. 😉  Midweek geocaching is not practical for me.  That said, I did make a quick stop yesterday, which turned out to be not such a good idea.

Earlier last weekend, the kids and I found our very first-ever GeoCoin! Oh boy, I was all excited abou that! For those who may not know, GeoCoins are non-monetary coins with tracking numbers on them. Their goal is to travel all around the globe, or whatever desitination their original owner sets for them.  For those of you familiar with military stuff, they are kinda like military challenge coins, only with tracking number. Hooah! 🙂

Well, we found the GeoCoin in our first stop on Sunday’s hunt. I made sure to very, very carefully write down the tracking number listed on the clear plastic case the coin was in. Tripple checked it, even.  Then, we did one more hunt than we initially planned just so that we could put our geocoin in it’s new home.

Later on that night, after the kids were more or less in bed, I logged on to Geocaching.com to log my finds and claim my geocoin/note its new home.  I very carefully input the tracking number I’d written down… only to find out that I’d forgotten that there is also a SECOND number, usually on the coin itself, that needs to be logged in order to claim/deposit it anywhere. D’oh!!! I’d totally forgotten about that, and now it was late at night and I’d taken sleep-inducing cough syrup already… so there was no going back out to retrieve the lill thing!

Of course, I did not want to leave a geocoin out there all by its lonesome, when everything on the internet said it was in a place other than where it actually was. D’oh! ::facepalm:: Finally, Wednesday morning, I had a chance to go back to the cache I left it in.  Luckily, it was very close to home, and only a small detour on my way to work. I was going into work a bit late Wednesday because of having to handle something at one of my kids’ schools, and was fortunately running way ahead of schedule and had a couple minutes to spare.

I unfortunately found out why I was way ahead of schedule, though.  As it turns out, the road I was on, where I thought the speed limit was 45 or 50… the speed limit was actually 35. Hmmm… who knew?? Not me…there’s not much by way of signage in that area.  :::baning head against wall::: Yes, that will be one very costly driver education lesson there.. at least $165, possibly more. *sigh*

But, once I was turned loose, I immediately (albeit, MUCH more slowly!) went back to pursuing my geocoin!  I arrived at the cache a few minutes later with no further law enforcemment meet ‘n greets. 🙂 I was very aware of the fact that there were a LOT of stay-at-home moms in the area… almost every garage door was open, and an SUV or car in every one, meaning someone was home.  This was on a public area, but there were a lot of homes nearby.  I could just see myself meeting up with Loganville Cop #2…first speeding, then planting suspicious items in the kudzu patch by the side of the road!

Fortunately, I found the cache with no problem.  Even more fortunately, the above-mentioned geocoin was STILL THERE! **whew** big, big relief! I grabbed that lill critter outta the cache, re-hid the cache, and jumped back in my mini-van.  Went straight to work and still go their earlier than I expected to. Yay!

Later on that day, the GeoCoin was duly logged as being in my possession.  I’ll definitely find a new home for it over this weekend… after making absolutely sure I log both numbers on it. 🙂  Lesson learned, the hard way! haha!

Happy day-before-friday, y’all!

Greetings, y’all!

Howdy! Welcome to my humble little blog, brought to you from my humble little home in my humble little town.  🙂 Allow me to introduce myself for a moment, if I may. 🙂

My name is Kat – “MamaKat” to friends far and wide.  Residing with me are hubby and four kids -the GeoTeens (Tiff (17) and Jacob (15)) and the GeoKids (Kathryn (9) and Jeff (7)).  A few weeks ago, we discovered the fun, adventurous and HIGHTLY ADDICTIVE hobby of geocaching. What is geocaching, you may ask?  Geocaching is essentially a big ole treasure hunt that takes you all over creation and back again.  Geocachers cleverly hide a cache – which can be as small as a pencil eraser or as big as a ten-gallon bucket (or bigger) and everything in between –  then list the cache on the Geocaching.com website, together with its GPS coordinates and whatever helpful hints or info they feel like providing.  Then, other geocachers  take those GPS coordinates, put them into their trusty little GPS units, and go off on a quest to find that which was hidden and cleverly concealed. It may be in a shopping center parking lot, OR it may be way off in the woods somewhere involving a pretty lengthy hike.  There are caches for all levels of adventure-seekers…from tame to  not-tame, LOL.  Once a geocacher finds the cache, which may be hiding in plain sight or covered in leaves and branches or magnetically stuck to something, they then sign the log book in the cache.  Often, there are neat little trinkets in the cache (usually dollar-store type stuff, but sometimes folks leave pretty neat stuff in them).  If you take a trinket (otherwise known as “swag” – “Stuff We All Get” – then leave something in return of equal or greater value.  Of course, no taking or leaving of trinkets is required – that’s just a neat little added bit of fun (kids love it especially!).  The fun of geocaching is in the hunt itself, and in finding the sneakily-hidden cache.   Check out this site for all kinds of good info on it.

Anyway, I discovered geocaching a couple weeks before Christmas and was hooked, as were the GeoTeens.  We were not very successful with our hunting, though, because I did not have a hand-held GPS unit (and my BlackBerry is so old & out of date, I can’t download any GPS/Geocaching apps to it!).  We wandered all over Loganville for hours without success.  But then, Christmas Day arrived, and Santa-Hubby got me a hand-held GPS, just for geocaching! Yay! And thus was born a new addiction hobby and fun-filled family activity. 🙂

There is one minor detail you need to know about me, however.  I have NO – and I do mean NO – sense of direction whatsoever.  Think I’m exaggeratiing? I’ve gotten lost in parking lots. Heck, now that I mention it, I got lost in a parking lot today – and yes, I had my car GPS on (but it wasn’t recognizing the un-named road we were on, so maybe I’m not totally hopeless).  So, a hobby that is directly linked to navigational skills is rather an odd one for me to fall into, hahaha! But since when have I ever done anything the easy way, or stuck to the well-worn path?? (Now literally as well as figuratively?) OK, so perhaps the reason I’m so often on the road less traveled is because I’m hopelessly lost and ended up there by accident, but whatever.  It’s an adventure all the way, and life is good. 🙂

This blog came into being at the suggestion of one of my Facebook friends, who thought that Geocaching was the perfect opportunity for an exercise in photojournalism, haha.  With all the random adventures me and the GeoKids & GeoTeens are having, it sounded like a good idea to me. 🙂 Of course, another minor glitch is that at present, I don’t have a camera. My previous BlackBerry had a great camera I loved… right up until it went swimming in a glass of sweet tea one day as I was driving to work (I’m not so good at this coordination thing, either, haha).  One of my bosses, God bless him, had mercy on me and gave me one of his old (old, old) BlackBerrys, for which I truly am eternally grateful.  It’s the camera-less version, however (which makes sense, cuz why does a commercial litigator need a BalckBerry camera? haha).  So, at present I am without a camera, until we can work one into the budget.  Hopefully that won’t be too terribly long. 🙂  For the time being, this will be a photo-less journal of our treks and adventures.

I won’t bore you with details right now, since it’s getting late and I have much to do in real-life grown-up world, but this weekend was our first time taking out my new GPS and hunting for caches.  We found two yesterday, and three today. We meandered into a shopping center plaza, two local parks, and a patch of kudzu by the side of the road, for starters.  Along the way we saw a collective total of three bunny rabbits and a frog, along with miscellaneous squirrels, oddly-shaped trees, and a plethora of vines and sticker bushes. (ouch!)  Each find was met with much celebration and high-fives all around.  The little GeoKids had a great time.  When I asked what their favorite part of geocaching was? They said it was seeing all the cool nature stuff.  Chalk one up for sneaky educational opportunities, hehe.

Well, that’s it for now. Signing off and getting back to cleaning and laundry and other much less adventurous stuff of the Mom variety.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!