Our First Geocaching Adventure

We bought a handheld GPS for Christmas. Actually we bought it with Canadian Tire money. (Great stuff that Canadian Tire money)! It's last year's model, so it was on sale yet too. The Engineer and I were a couple of happy shoppers :o).

On Monday we decided to try it out. It was a snowy and blowy morning, but we dressed warm and headed out.

There are geocaches hidden all over the county and many are only minutes drive from our house. The Engineer went on www.geocaching.com the evening before to get coordinates for several different caches. Our first one was just down the road from us in one of the farmer's wood lots. After we arrived in the van, we kind of cross countried it on foot until we found the path. We're new at this ;o)! We discovered that the coordinates on our GPS are accurate within ten feet.

After a little roaming we found the cache! This one was a regular sized cache.

We checked out all the trinkets left inside by other geocachers. Do you see the camel? I guess some wisemen had been by earlier :o)! Then we signed and dated the book with a little note that said "our first find!"

Just up the road a bit is a really old graveyard. There is a micro cache hidden in it somewhere, but we did not find it. We wandered and poked around, and wandered and poked around. We looked up, down, and under. No success!

So we moved on to another one hidden in a grave yard. (There is actually an entire series of caches hidden in graveyards all around the county). This time we were successful! Now that we have a better idea what we're looking for, we'll have to go back to the other one sometime and see if we can find it yet.

We figured we were getting the hang of this, so despite beginning to feel a little chilly, we headed off to a series of caches around the old gravel pits. It was snowing like crazy by that point, but so beautiful!

This camouflage cache was a little bigger and it even had a couple trinkets in it including a geocache coin! Once we signed and dated this one. We put it back and raced back to the van! We'll finish the rest of the loop another day. It was time to warm up with some hot chocolate that our SIL made for us for Christmas!

We got stopped in our tracks though to admire the wildlife. Isn't he/she cute? I think he was very unimpressed by the snow, but it sure looked pretty landing all over him.

What a marvelous way to end our first geocaching adventure!