Cache on Hand

Since we didn't take any trips over spring break, we had the usual loooong week stretched ahead of us with no school, no activities ... no nothing. Although it's nice to have a break from running around, we do tend to get cabin fever on breaks like this, hanging around the house all week with nowhere to go. So we had to make our own fun!

As a result, I decided to try something with the girls that we'd never done before: Geocaching. I had read about this recently and knew instantly that the girls would love it. There are these "caches" of secret "treasures" (read: junk) hidden everywhere ... and I do mean everywhere. The sole purpose of these caches is so that people can search for them and find them, using GPS technology (all you need these days is a smart phone). It's like a high-tech treasure hunt. You just search for your zip code on geocaching.com—we have 68 caches within just three miles of our house. GPS coordinates are given for each cache, and you use that to search out the treasure. Each cache is rated for difficulty of finding the cache and difficulty of the terrain. (You can also get a geocaching app for your phone, which allows you to search for caches near to wherever you happen to be.)

 

The girls with their peanut-butter-jar treasure

For our first cache search, we went to Settlers' Park, which is a teeny, overgrown, wild little park on the Milwaukee River, across the street from the Mequon library. We just headed down the hill toward the river, and using the maps on my phone (especially the satellite pictures), we located the cache within about 3 minutes. It was an old (empty) peanut butter jar, covered in camouflage tape and stuck in a big old hollow tree. The girls were so psyched to find it!

Inside the peanut butter jar were a variety of things people had left there: A Hello Kitty keychain, a tiny flashlight, a small rubberband ball, etc. The girls were fascinated with the various things that were in that jar. The rule is, you can take something from the cache, as long as you leave something behind of similar value. We didn't bring anything with us that was suitable for leaving, so we didn't take anything. The girls were very disappointed about that, but we talked about how the point of the whole thing is the fun of searching and finding, not keeping. But I promised we would bring something with us next time. There was also a small log and some mini pencils in the jar, so we joined the remarkably long list of people who had signed the log stating they had found the cache. We noticed, in fact, that somebody had just signed the log earlier that day! Who knew this activity was so popular?

On the way home from Settlers' Park, we decided to make a quick stop to find one more cache, in the little cemetary on the corner of Range Line and Mequon Road. I was a bit nervous galavanting around a cemetary with two little kids in search of "treasure"—it seemed disrespectful or something. (But apparently cemetaries are big geocache locations.) Anyway, the "cache" turned out to be just a keychain container with a screw-on end, hooked on a fence. All that fit in there was a tiny piece of rolled-up paper that served as the log. We didn't even have a pen on us, so we couldn't sign it. So unlike the Settlers' Park cache, there really was no "treasure." That was a bit of a letdown for the girls.

Despite the disappointing second cache, Elsa and Claire loved geocaching and have been begging me to do more of it (especially Elsa). I think this will be a great activity when the weather gets nicer again this spring and summer. Lakeshore Middle School, right up the road from our house, apparently has a two-part cache somewhere on the grounds of the school. You have to find the first cache, and that will give you the necessary clues to find the second one. So that sounds like a lot of fun and we're looking forward to trying that one on the next nice day. (I'll try to take more pictures next time. This post is sadly bare with just the one picture that I thought to take!)

And in the meantime, every time we drive past Settlers' Park, the girls now say, "There's the peanut butter jar! It's down there somewhere! Hi peanut butter jar!" So clearly geocaching has had a lasting impact.