SNAKES ALIVE!

After a long hiatus from geocaching, the GeoKidz and I finally had a chance to jump back into our favorite game/sport/obsession this weekend! Saturday, we attended the monthly meeting of the Georgia Geocacher’s Association, which was held this month at Little Mulberry Park in Dacula.

The feature presentation this month was given by Dr. Mark Patterson of the Georgia herpetological Society, with assistance from his slithery friends, the snakes.  Not just any snakes, mind you… but snakes that are native to and prevelent in our backyards (literally) here in Gwinnett and Walton counties.  He brought out some really beautiful critters, such as the black rat snake, the red rat snake (a/k/a “corn snakes”), the pine snake and even a small copperhead. (Don’t worry, the copperhead was kept in a sturdy plexiglass box the entire time!)

Photo Courtesy of The Georgia Geocacher's Association (www.ggaonline.org)

Dr. Patterson provided a wealth of information about these species.  He discussed their habitats, what they feed on (mostly rats and mice, so they are actually good to have around. Since we now live in a very old farmhouse in a big ole meadow… I’m good with that. 😉 ), and what to do if you encounter a snake (screaming and running may be understandable, but unless it’s venomous, don’t kill it!).  Did you know that one lone rat snake can curtail the rat/mouse population in its immediate area by over 19,000 rodents a year???? Before you aim that gun, think of all 19,000 of those mice moving into your home in the absence of their crowd-controlling predator!

Dr. Patterson also discussed what to do if you are bitten by a venomous snake.  First, don’t panic and run.  Panicking and running will increase your heart rate and your adrenaline production – both of which will only serve to speed up the spread of the venom throughout your body. Definitely not what you want to happen!  Call 911 and do your best to stay calm.  Do not apply a tourniquet, and do not do the old “cutting into the wound and sucking out the poison” routine you’ve heard about your whole life.  All that does is make you bleed more and introduce a whole slew of new germs into your wound, greatly increasing your chances of infection.

The good news, according to Dr. Patterson, is that an extremely small number of people actually die each year from snake bits.  I cannot recall the exact statistics, but the number is actually quite miniscule.  So, the good news is that if you get bit, chances are you will make it just fine, so long as you seek prompt medical attention.  Folks who have a much higher risk of complications from snake bites are the very young, the very old, and people with fragile immune systems.  (Side note to any EMS folks out there…feel free to chime in on this in the comments and correct, add to, or otherwise expound on this info. You know WAY more than I do about this stuff!!!)

All in all, it was a fantastic meeting.  The GeoKidz and I had a great time.  We also kicked butt in the raffle following the snake presentation. GeoKid2 won a key chain for his collection, and I won a nifty little tote bag with the Georgia Geocacher’s Association logo on the front.  We also met many other geocachers, some of whom we’ve “met” online discussing caches and events, but never in person.

After the meeting, the GeoKids and I went out in search of geocaches.  It’s been too many months since we’d done so, and were just itching to get back into it. 🙂 We found one on Saturday, and then three on Sunday afternoon… including that pesky one hidden at the Oasis Bowling alley that we’ve searched for over the course of at least six months! And yes…we’d walked right past it a trillion times and somehow missed it. Till yesterday! Ha!

Sunday afternoon, we also went to Tribble Mill Park, which is a veritable gold mine of geocaches. We finished finding the last two of a series of caches honoring John Wayne: The Good (which we found on 01/02/11), The Bad, and The Ugly.  The kids really enjoyed searching these out.  As we walked back to the car, my eight-year-old GeoKid said very seriously, “I love nature.  It’s all beautiful and stuff!”

And that’s what it’s all about. 🙂

Happy hunting, everyone!

So… It’s Been A While…

It has been quite a while since I’ve written a blog post (mid-May, I believe).  Come to think of it, it’s been quite a while  since I’ve gone geocaching, which explains in part why I haven’t blogged much.  This is, after all, a blog about my (and the GeoKidz’)  favorite hobby.  🙂

But, life gets in the way sometimes.   Right now, our family is undergoing some pretty cataclysmic changes that are keeping us from our usual weekend geocaching adventures.  They are ultimately changes for the better, to be sure…but there’s still a lot of upheaval right now.  Beginning at the beginning, kinda….

Some of you may remember that in late May/early June, my Prodigal Son, GeoTeen2, went missing.  Not kidnapped or anything horrific like that, thank God… he just up & ran away.   He was gone a full seven days before he was caught.  A whole week.  One Hundred and Sixty-Eight Hours. Ten Thousand, Eighty Minutes… of not knowing where my kid was.  If he was safe.  If he was dead.  If he was hurt and in a coma somewhere.  If he was eating.  If he was getting in trouble.  If he fell into the wrong hands and was trapped in a nightmare.  If he was coming home.  If he was even in Georgia anymore.  If, if, if…. IF!  It was the longest, most exhausting, most horrific week of my entire life – all thirty-eight years of it so far.   I was playing phone tag with detectives.  Answering myriad questions. Asking even more.  Emailing as many of his Facebook friends as I could.  His sister was scouring through Loganville, finding as many of his friends as she could, searching for him, for some clue, ANY clue, as to where he was.  I even began to solicit local radio stations for help.  His siblings and I were terrified we’d never see him again.  Here’s a friendly tip for you to stow away in your memory:  If you are looking for your MIA teen, never, ever, EVER Google “what to do when your teen runs away”!  The statistics of runaways and what can happen to them are horrifying and will do nothing to contribute to your peace of mind.  

Yeah, so…that was a bad week.  Thank God they found him…thank God.  Safe and sound and in one piece.  The Loganville Police Department, and in particular Detective Massey, were absolutely out-freaking-standing during this time.  They worked hard to find him for me.  They were accessable, responsive,  patient with my dumb questions, my moments of panic, and my random, miscellaneous emails/calls/messages whenever I thought of any little thing, no matter how absurdly ridiculous or tiny, that maybe, just might help.   His little disappearing act got him another 30 days, but I’m OK with that… I know where he is and he can’t take off from there! 🙂  Ha! He’ll be home soon.   Speaking of home…

The biggest change of all.  The most difficult.  I hesitate to write of it. 

Our family is in the process of moving.  We are not moving far at all, just a little over six miles down the road, but move we must.  As a newly-single mom, I simply cannot afford the mortgage, the bills (especially the inside-the-city-limits water/sewage bills…OUCH!), and whatnot.  And even if I could…honestly, I think a change of location just might be good for us, especially a certain teenager. 

Now, don’t go thinking that you’re getting rid of us.  Oh no, not that easy!!!!! 🙂 We are not moving far at all.  Just far enough to where we will be in a somewhat rural area (with cows for neighbors…yay!) and different schools.  But not so far that we’ll have to change churches and babysitters and scout troops and whatnot.  Just enough change to be good for us, and just enough stays the same to give the kids some measure of stability in the midst of it all.   Loganville is still our hometown, and we are still firmly rooted in the community.  The big move happens within the next week or so, so this weekend is my last bit of free time to frantically scramble to get everything packed and ready to go.  I made progress last weekend, but still have a good bit to go. OK, most of it. haha.  Since I put the “pro” in procrastination and excel at the last-minute-freakout-to-get-everything-done, haha, I predict this will be a really productive weekend. 😀

I love where the kids and I are moving.  We are renting a 101-year-0ld farmhouse that just OOZES peace and tranquility…qualities we all very much need right now.  But I’m sad, too.  Deeply sad.  Leaving this house we live in is probably the hardest part of all.   When we bought it, I swore I’d live there for the rest of my life.   There’s an amazing story behind our home.  The community poured out SO MUCH LOVE and so much hard work to create this home for us.   So many did so much with a ton of love.  To walk away from that feels like a betrayal of everyone’s love and everyone’s hard work.   It feels like a slap in the face to those who poured themselves into the project.  It feels disresepctful.  It feels shameful…disgraceful. It feels like failure.  This isn’t how the story was supposed to end.  Nope, I was going to stay planted RIGHT THERE till the very end of my days…not because of the actual house itself so much, as the love that was poured into it on our behalf.

But…well, Life has a way of interrupting our plans.  This is not a decision I reached easily.  This is not even a decision I want to make.  But… when all is said and done, I’ve got to do what is best for my family.  My kids and their well-being come first.  Period.  We need to live in a more affordable home in a more affordable area.  We need a fresh start in so many ways.  When it comes right down to it…. We’ve got to move.  Just no other way around it.   So… move we shall.

So, that’s why there have been no blog posts about quirky adventures and random travels as we hunt down cleverly-hidden geocaches all over Georgia.  There’s just been no time.  Our world has collapsed, shattered, and imploded.  Picking up the pieces and rebuilding a whole new world is a full-time job, and then some. 

But once we’re all moved and settled in, you better believe that the GeoKidz and I will be back out there, hunting for our hidden treasures…using a billion-dollar satellite system to find Tupperware hidden in the woods, having zany adventures along the way.

There are lots of geocaches in the area to which we are moving.

I’ve already checked.  🙂

 

What a Month!

As I mentioned earlier this week, April was one massive whirlwind of events!  Some were good, some not so good, but all of them were exhausting. 😉 Thank God for coffee, that’s all I can say – ha!

It all started with the littlest GeoKidz and I attending the Georgia Geocacher’s Association April meeting at Mistletoe State Park in or near Augusta, GA.  Yes, during Masters weekend! I am not a golf fan in the least, so I didn’t much care about all the fuss over who’s playing in the Masters, who’s winning, who’s losing… WHO CARES?! 😉 (Sorry to all golf fans out there – no offense intended… I’m just not into sports much at all.).  The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and it was a PERFECT day to be outside.  Of course, the pollen count that day was roughly ten trillion, so the Kidz and I were all stuffy and fighting off pollen-induced sore throats.   

The highlight of the day was the game of “human checkers” that the event organizers put together.  I have pics on my camera that I hope to download tonight (I’ve been saying that for two weeks, so don’t hold your breath TOO much… I put the “PRO” in “Procrastination”…got it down to an art form. 😉 )  They had cut out huge plywood squares big enough for folks to stand on, and painted them red and black.  The people playing the red checkers were given red t-shirts and red bandanas.  The black checker people had black t-shirts and black bandanas. 🙂 At each end of the checkerboard, there were ladders upon which the team captains sat.  They had a perfect overview of the board and could order their people where to move.   GeoKid2 had been dying to play checkers all day, so he jumped right in as a black checker. 🙂 He had a great time playing for the first five or ten minutes, then he was “jumped” by the red team – game over for the little fella! He took it in stride though and thought it was all just the funniest thing!  After the game, the kids and I took off and found a couple geocaches hidden in the park.  There are several more I want to find, but since this was approximately two-and-a-half hours from home and it was getting late in the day, we decided it was best to go ahead and mosey on back towards Loganville and call it a day. 🙂  I’m pretty sure that day was the only day we were able to get out and hunt some caches… stupid “real life,” intruding on my hiking/playing time! Grrr! Ah well, it was better than nothing. 🙂

My Prodigal Son (GeoTeen2) returned home on April 21 – a/k/a the Thursday before Good Friday, a/k/a “Maundy Thursday.”  So far, so good.   Keep your fingers crossed and send up the prayers that he stays on track this time and continues doing what is good (and court-ordered – lol) and avoiding what is bad.  🙂  Easter was the usual whirlwind of activities, culminating in a beautiful Easter service and then the traditional dinner and egg hunt at the in-laws’ house. 

This past weekend, the Geokidz and I – yes, all four of them! – went camping together.  GeoKid2 is wrapping up his first year in cub scouts (awww….cute!) and this was the annual “Family Camping” event held up at Mount Rainey Mountain near Clayton, GA.  We had a GREAT time (except for GeoTeen1, who is terrified of the dark and the woods… .and seeing as how there wasn’t much anything by way of city lights or any lights in the camping area after sundown… she stayed curled up in a ball in the tent zipped up tight while the rest of us roasted marshmallows. She refused to come out or even budge from her hidey-corner till daylight).  GeoKid1 had his first-ever experiences shooting BB guns and bows & arrows…he earned a couple cub scout belt loops for his accomplishments.  GeoTeen2 likewise got to partake of the shooting of BBs and pointy things, as well as saving the day and helping me get the camp fire started when it was being stubborn. 🙂

All in all, April was fantastic… lots of great things happened, some rough things happened, but in the end, God is good and so is life. 🙂

Rock on, everyone!

A Caching Quickie

FINALLY, I have broken my long streak of being cooped up indoors and not being able to breathe semi-fresh air (this IS Atlanta, after all…full of pollen and polutants, but hey, allow me my delusion for a moment, ‘k? 😉 )! 

Since our family has to wake up SO freakin’ early in the mornings (and I am not by nature a morning person…I’m a night person, which is good because I like to hang out with these folks a lot, haha! Always gotta be hunting something, I guess! 😀 LOL!), usually by the time I get home I’m exhausted and ready to crumple into an incoherent heap.  And usually, that’s pretty much what I do – dinner, kids’ baths, homework, and then…CRASH!

But last night, I’d had ENOUGH of being cooped up!!! Enough, I say! Traffic was uncharacteristically kind to me, and I arrived at the GeoKids’ daycare a few minutes – like three – before 6:00 – something that almost NEVER happens, though I leave my office at 4:30 on the dot.   Took them home, coerced my teen into browning some ground beef for me so I could get a head start on sphaghetti for dinner, and then essentially turned right around and took GeoTeen1 to youth group.  Home less than 45 minutes, but that’s much longer than we are usually home several nights a week, LOL!

I figured that we had just enough daylight for me and the GeoKids to find a couple of the nearby local caches.  And by local, I mean a mile or less from our house! #winning! 😉 I didn’t bother to change clothes from work because (a) I hadn’t really had time, and (b) from the descriptions, I figured both were in nice, well-paved areas that would not necessitate crawling thru thickets or slogging thru mud. OK, well, I was half right! 😉

Our first didn’t even require our car GPS to figure out where the general location was… it was the “Downtown/Main Street USA – Loganville” cache.  Main Street isn’t particularly huge, and if you are going for smack-dab center of the street/nifty historical value, there’s pretty much only one spot real good for that. 🙂 However, that said, it took a little longer than I expected to find it, haha… Had to search pretty methodically before I found the thing. I was a little nervous, as I couldn’t really see where I was sticking my hands…there was a wasp sleeping on the flagpole next to us, and the whole time I kept thinking, “Oh PLEASE don’t let there be a bees’ nest hiding in here anywhere!” Ha! (Note to self: add gloves to cache supply bag asap….!)  GeoKid1 was in charge of the camera and was snapping pics right & left (most of which came out blurry, as you’ll see, but it’s all good!). Finally found the cache, signed the log, and away we went to cache number two!

 

After we conqured this one, we moved on to the next… it was the “Silver Bullet #4” geocache.   The hint made me think it was located in a similar urban/commercial-type area that would be a breeze to get to.

Yeah, not so much.  More like an area of future development that has not reached the paving stage yet.  And if you live in GA, you know that for a week solid, we’ve had nothing but heavy downpours and thundrstorms. Fun time! Yay! Slogging thru mud in dress shoes! (They are brand new, but thankfully only paid like $3 for them at thrift store so I wasn’t overly freaked out. 🙂 ).  Fortunately, much of the ground was firm-packed earth/fine gravel-like stuff so it wasn’t TOO bad… only had to slog thru one truly oozy and icky area briefly. The kids, of course, LOVED it! Jump! Splash! Splat! Ooze! Fun times. 🙂

GeoKid2 found it in no time flat. I had a pretty good idea, based on the description, of exactly what we were looking for. He made a beeline for it once we saw it (not saying what “it” is so as not to spoil the fun for others!) and sure enough, the cache was hanging out right where I thought it would be. 🙂

We finished finding our geocaches by 7:45, then traveled the .06 mile back home to finish making dinner before having to pick up GeoTeen1 from youth group.

All in all, it was a super-quick cache run that provided a nice diversion to our typical weeknight drugery and gave us all a much-needed shot of Kid Fun for the day. 🙂

Thanking God we’ve made it to Thursday… one more day, and the weekend is here! Woot! Have a good one, folks!

So it’s been a WHOLE MONTH (or more)…!

Yep, here it is… a month or more since I’ve been geocaching!!!! Horrors!!! I’m in serious withdrawal in a big way, but Life has NOT cooperated by any means! We’ve got a lot going on, to say the least.

GeoTeen2 came home as scheduled. We got him re-enrolled in school, etc… and then a whole two-and-a-half weeks later (this past Wednesday, in fact) – BAM – he ends up right back in juvie.  He STILL hasn’t figured out that when the judge tells you that you MUST go to boot camp, well, you really MUST.  “Oversleeping” or “forgetting what time it was” and so on are NOT adequate reasons for missing five days of BC and skipping school twice.  So… away we go again.  On the bright side, he’s in a different place now that is only five miles or so from my office, so I wont’ have to miss much work to go pick him up when he’s released, to the delight of my wonderfully-understanding bosses.  Visiting hours are also at a better time, so that makes life easy too. 🙂 Here’s hoping it really sinks in this time and we don’t ever have to do this again… besides being heartbreaking and such, it’s also just plain exhausting.  😦

In other news, there’s just been a lot going on in every area of life.  GeoKid2, The Boy, has been back into cub scouts again on Monday nights.  This past Wednesday, I ended up in a Bible study/mentorship meeting  that USUALLY takes place on Saturdays (only for the next month or two, then I’m done), but ended up HAVING to be on this particular night for a variety of reasons/schedule conflicts.  Normally no problem, except  that for the fact that during Lent, our church is doing a study on “40 Days of Community” via various small groups…and mine just happens to meet on Thursdays, cuz that’s the one with childcare so that’s the one I can go to, LOL. Oh, and I forgot, on Tuesday, GeoTeen1 had her bi-weekly counseling appt, which is usually on Fridays since that’s that night GeoTeen2 does NOT have bootcamp…but for a variety of reasons, it ended up being on Tuesday, just this once.  So this week has been NON-STOP – MondayTuesdayWednesdayThursday…. and here we are, FINALLY at FRIDAY!  Oh, wait… forgot to mention last weekend, I went HERE with these folks – it was EXTREMELY fun and I had a GREAT time (my newest adventure/addiction, along with geocaching, LOL…hmmm…wonder if I can combine the two??? LOL! Probably not…hmmmm….) ~  so I’ve been going NON-STOP since Saturday of last weekend!!!! 😮  It was a perfect storm of all our carefully-planned, carefully-coordinated commitments crunching together in one fell swoop in one week, right after each other.  Taken individually, and staying where they belong, the aforementioned commitments are manageable.  Squash them altogether into a much-condensed time frame, and you get my life this week. LOL!

Not every week has been this extreme…in fact, I think this past week is the MOST extremely busy week I’ve had in years, if ever.  Holy cow.  But life, overall, has been chaotic to some degree or another and has kept me away from the trails and my GPS and my geocaching.  GeoTeen1 is working as a volunteer at an auction tomorrow (Saturday) morning, but after it ends at 2 (and I hope I can score some cool deals there!), there’s NOTHING planned. NOTHING. 🙂  I was so excited about tomorrow, because after the youth auction, me and the GeoKidz had planned to take full advantage of the extended daylight hours and find us some caches!!! And I’d planned the same for Sunday afternoon, after church. (yeah, yeah, yeah… I’ll squeeze in laundry and house cleaning somewhere in there, but I’m sick of being cooped up inside… MUST. ESCAPE. SOON. MUST. COMMUNE. WITH. NATURE. MUST. FIND. GEOCACHES!)

BUT… Old Man Weather seems bent on ruining my plans for escape.  Turns out tomorrow there is a 70% chance of rain all day, and a 50% chance on Sunday! Seriously. :::facepalm::: My one free weekend to geocache, and…. boom.  Rain.  and more rain.  and still more rain! Maybe the weatherman will be wrong and the rain will hold off until evening.  I’m hoping so.  If I don’t escape soon and get some “OUTSIDE” time, I just might go insane. More than normal, I mean. 😉 Either that, or I just might spontaneously combust into a huge ball of stress.  Neither of which would be much fun, so… rain? Please go away till after sunset!!!

Here’s hoping we can make our escape.

Cheers,

MamaKat & Co.

 

Our Bamboo Forest Adventure

Well, after a reasonably successful day of geocaching yesterday, I was more than ready to attack the bamboo forest in Gainesville today following our visit with my son at the YDC.

After visiting hours were over, GeoTeen1 (“GT1”) and I headed out for the forest. I’m very NOT familiar with this area, so I got a little turned around here & there till we finally found where we were supposed to be.  Parked our GeoVan at about 10 till 3, and away we went.

The forest itself was WAY COOL! It was smaller than I expected… for some reason, I’d thought it would be acres & acres of winding, serene trails.  It was much smaller than that, but nonetheless, it was still gorgeous. It was also several degrees cooler in the forest, which was good…I’d worn a long-sleeve shirt, and with it being in the low 60s today (yay – FINALLY!) it was kinda too warm.

We spent the first several minutes just wandering around the forest, enjoying the view.  It was like a whole ‘nother world in there!  A hawk would periodically screech, birds were chirping, etc. 😀 Very serene and pretty!  After our sight-seeing tour, we got down to business to try to find this durn geocache!

I remembered reading in the online logbooks that GPS reception was spotty at best in many places in the forest.  The bamboo, which was sky-high, created a very thick canopy between us and the sky.  The other geocacher’s experience proved to be true for us, as well.  I spent almost an hour zig-zagging back and forth and going into random circles.  Oooh, 38 feet left!….no, wait… 52 feet right…. no…. 23 feet back the other way… up this hill, down this hill, maybe over here, and…. argh! Finally, when the GPS told me AGAIN that it was 26 feet from me, I decided to give up using the durn thing (yes, still learning, slowly, not to rely too much on it!).  I randomly picked a spot (a tree, actually), and started circling around the tree, poking anything & everything with my walking stick to find the buried treasure. 🙂  Every circle around the tree, I went wider and wider until I was reasonably sure that it wasn’t there.  When I was done with that little exercise in dizziness, I picked a new spot to start over in.  After a couple more rotations around the new spot, I stopped and looked around for a minute.  If I were a geocache, where would I hide?  What doesn’t look quite right…what doesn’t quite fit in??? Suddenly, something caught my eye that of course I’d passed by ten billion times before.

I walked over to this area, and using my walking stick, nudged this thing (won’t say what it was so as to not spoil the fun for others) over a bit to see if anything was under it.  And… SUCCESS!!!!!! Yep, there it was, the small geocache container I’d been searching for forever. 🙂 OK, maybe not quite FOREVER, but it was starting to feel that way. 🙂 My GPS still insisted it was 48 feet in the opposite direction though, LOL! GT1 and I signed the logbook, swapped out some trinkets, and headed back home. 🙂

This was definitely an extremely neat, fun, awesome, and UNIQUE cache! 🙂 If you ever happen to be up this way, try to find this one. It’s absolutely beautiful scenery, and, whether you find it or not, you won’t be sorry you visited there. 🙂

If you want to see all the pics I took, click HERE. 🙂

Happy hunting, y’all!

 

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!