Caching Days are Here Again!

Geocaching has been a favorite hobby of ours for some time now, but what was once a boderline obsession has nearly fallen to the wayside lately!  Let's just say that 2009 hasn't been a banner geocaching year for us!  Guess it all started with a very cold winter combined with our winter & spring being consumed with house projects getting ready to put it on the market.  Summer usually finds us doing a lot of biking & caching, but for some reason much of our summer seemed to find us in cache-free zones.  We did manage to get a fair amount in on our annual July camping trip in the Black Hills of South Dakota, but even that did little to change our fairly pathetic cache count for the year.  Fall is often a great time for it as the weather is perfect for hiking but after a hotter than normal September followed by a record cold & wet October, much of our fall activities were thwarted.  Finally this past weekend we found ourselves with nothing to do & a fairly nice weekend to figure it out... so a little hiking & caching seemed to be just the thing!   So we headed out Saturday for a few hours of hiking in a nearby park that has numerous x-country ski / hiking trails with caches strewn all about.  The kids are generally eager to go as they love "treasure hunting" & we are on strict orders to let them look first. 

This park had a lot of "clever" caches including the one that the kids are standing by in plain sight... they needed a few hints from us to find this one, however.  We had such a great day, even though we only hit about 5 of the 12 caches in the area during our 3 hour hike, that we made tentative plans to return the next day to finish off the caches in the park.

So Sunday we spent another 3.5 hours or so hiking the park & managed to find the remaining caches.  Our numbers for the year may be down, but in just 2 nice days of fall hiking, we not only upped our yearly total by about 1/3 but we also found some of the most clever caches we've seen in a long time. 

One was a treasure within a treasure where we had to find which mini-container had the little log book out of several hundred film containers... we found it on try 178!

If you are interested in more information about geocaching, check out http://www.geocaching.com/.  It is basically hiking (or biking or even driving) with a purpose & is a great family activity.