Jan 26

We moved yesterday. There’s a Geo-caching group holding a rally a few miles down the road from the Boomer group, so we signed up and came to learn more about this geo-caching stuff. If you aren't familiar with geo-caching, people hide caches in the form of bottles, boxes, ammo cans, cookie tins, or other small, hopefully waterproof containers. They contain a log book and sometimes little trinkets or caching coins. Then you go to the geo-caching website and get the coordinates, put them in your GPS and set out on a treasure hunt. Gerry got geo-caching GPS for Christmas and we found one cache near the kids' house.

Two days ago we found a cache that had been placed about a mile from the Boomer rally camp, so that made our second official cache find. Then yesterday we tracked down two more near the new gathering. So we are officially up to 4 caches! Woohoo! There’s one couple here with 5200 some, so we have a way to go.

Today was a fun rally. There are five caches. You get a set of coordinates for the first one. Go there and find the cache, look at the piece of paper inside the bottle that is the cache for your next location, and take a colored marble. Put the piece of paper back in the bottle and go to the next set of coordinates. Is this hard? Went great until we got to the third cache, which was right where it was supposed to be, contained the right color marbles, but had no piece of paper for the next set of coordinates. What part of “put the paper back in the bottle” did someone not understand? It generated a little hoopla, but we eventually found all five of our marbles (it’s a terrible thing to not be able to find all your marbles) and reported back in. Since the first group out had a team that found all five caches in 27 minutes, there was no danger of us getting first place even if all the clues had been left in place.

So far, the benefits of geo-caching include a vigorous walk that doesn’t feel like ‘going for a walk’ and a good excuse to wander around in the desert, looking closely at the rocks and bushes. Gypsy really likes it. Now if we can just teach her to sniff out the caches we’ll be set.