First

Today, even though it is very cold and crisp outside, I ventured out to geocache and get some exercise. Last night before I went to bed, I had checked out the geocaching website and noticed that there was a new one published not too far from my home. I decided then, that if it was still "unfound" in the morning, I would trek out and see if I could find it.

Things got complicated when J left for work this morning and needed to use my GPS. He has one too but it is an older model and I am not all that familiar with it. After coffee and breakfast, I checked out the website again, and found that the cache was still undiscovered. I grabbed up his GPS, put the coordinates in after playing with it for a few minutes, got some warm clothes on and headed out the door.

The walk wasn't long and soon I was close to where I needed to be. The cache page included a hint which I deciphered since I was using the older GPS and didn't know how much accuracy it would provide once I got close. The hint didn't actually help that much either as "fallen log near upright pine" pretty much described the entire area I was in...but they forgot to mention "tons of leaves and pine needles" as well, so I figured I had my work cut out for me.

Fortunately for me, not only was it kind of early in the morning, it was also very cold so there were not a lot of other people out and about on foot. The park I was in is pretty popular normally but part of it is being reconstructed so one end of the trail is cut off and I am sure that helped keep the population down as well. Anyhow, the reason I was glad that no one was around was because I had to look for a pretty long time for this one. J's GPS doesn't have a compass like mine. His requires that you continue to move for it to work, where as mine is an electronic compass and you don't have to be moving to know the direction. Anyhow, after several hits and misses, I decided to just look at the coordinates on the sheet and move around until the coordinates on the GPS matched up. This worked and I found the cache easily.

This was my first to find first and I was able to sign the log first and get the travel bug that was in the cache. I plan to hold onto the travel bug until I go geocaching during the holidays on the west coast. This will get the little guy some miles on its record.

As I was leaving the area, I did see a couple walking for exercise (they didn't see me since I was back in the trees) and then as I came out of the park, a women with three kids was heading in, and I am guessing they were looking for the cache too as they were entering where I left which was the reconstructed area. So I was almost found out by only a few minutes...whooooeee!!!