Kara and I were looking for something to do on Sunday morning, so I suggested we try geocaching. It's not something that either of us had done before, but I thought it was worth a shot since Kara likes to take walks with Jessica, and I like playing with my iPhone!
Geocaching is a hobby where people hide boxes of things in random places and then post the exact latitude and longitude of the boxes. The idea is that other people then try to find the box by using maps and GPS. If you want to take something from the box, you leave something else of equal value. And in the box is a little log book where people write their names and the date they found it.
I described the idea to Kara and she seemed mildly interested. Neither of us knew what to expect, but we bundled up Jessica and headed off to the closest cache from our apartment. It was a short 0.3 miles, but when we arrived we couldn't find the cache. We had no idea what size the box should be, or where to really look, and we eventually decided to give up and walk to the next closest cache.
This one went much better, we found the trail after a short amount of searching, and found the cache laying on the ground. The cache had a few toys in it, so we took a little plastic horse. We didn't leave anything because we didn't know about that rule yet!
When we got back to our apartment, we hopped in the car and headed off to my parents house for lunch. On the drive over, I was looking up reviews on iPhone apps for geocaching. There was a free trial version that showed nearby caches, so as we pulled up I launched it. There was a cache less than 300 feet from my parents' house! So when we got a few spare minutes, Kara and I hiked out to find it. This one had a clue which helped us find a teeny tiny tube that held a rolled up piece of paper. We had no idea that these caches could be so small, so we weren't surprised that we hadn't found the first cache we attempted.
On the drive home from my parents', I looked up caches in Washington Park to see if we wanted to try for another. There was one called the Little Girl Cache that had toys for girls in it. We decided to drive up there and try to locate it. This one took a while of wandering around, but Kara ventured into the bushes a bit and came back with a green box in her hand. We looked through it and found a sticker of a cat that we thought Jessica might like. We now knew about the 'take one, leave one' rule, so we left the plastic horse that we found earlier. With the cache found, we then turned our attention to our surroundings. We walked down to a giant play structure and Jessica and I played on a swing. The rose garden was in full bloom, so we walked over there and looked at tons of flowers. Then we headed back to the car because it was soon to be Jessica's dinner time.
So, geocaching was a hit! We attempted 4 and found 3 on our first day. We're talking about going out again on Monday to find more, and to try again for the one we couldn't find. It's surprising how many caches there are around, so if you want to give it a try, go to geocaching.com!
