Happy Moother?s Day everyone! What an interesting photo of some cows. I bet you are wondering what that has to do with our Mother?s Day weekend. Yea, me too. No, there is not a cow story to accompany the photo. Just the picture and the bad Moother?s Day pun.

This holiday weekend was the beginning of the 2007 geocaching season for me and my family. Emily and I decided to break in the season in by going on a few easy caches? here in town. My goal was to find a few treasures, but the last one had to land us at a park so we could kick back and relax for a bit.

LAND SHARK! Everyone be very careful. I hear there are land sharks at the first cache we went searching for. This cache was called ?Shark Attach 2 - The revenge of Jaws? and it landed us in a swanky apartment facility that I have driven by many times. The cache was an easy find and Emily was thrilled when she found it all on her own. As we were plundering our loot, it dawned on me that I was standing near the apartment complex?s pool. It was then that the name of this cache finally clicked. We were a little early for land sharks yet, but in another week or two I bet this cache location is teaming with them.

After we narrowly avoided the hazards of the land sharks, we started looking for a cache called “WAP Marks the Spot”. It was located in a park a few blocks north of the last cache. It was located in a nice little park with a baseball diamond and a small play area. We carefully avoided the two teenagers that were practicing their golf ball driving in a green open area and navigated our way to a clump of evergreen trees. Peeling back the branches of one of the larger ones, Emily and I found ourselves standing in our very own evergreen room. It was very cool, and there was hidden booty to boot.

On Sunday, it was time to celebrate Mother?s Day. Mary decided that she would like to have a picnic at Fox Run Park this year. It was a bit cloudy and I do believe we got sprinkled on just a bit but that did not drown our spirits. We first packed our food to one of the two little ponds in this park and enjoyed a wonderful lunch. After lunch the girls waded into the pond just a bit and enjoyed the water. After we had picnicked we headed to the playground where Emily could burn off some energy. While Emily climbed on the play equipment, Kelly and I got to play catch with our monstrously huge Frisbee. Mary and Emily kept joining in the Frisbee fun every once in a while and we all had a great time.

On the drive home we saw those cows leaning on the fence next to a dude ranch near the park. We thought they were funny so we took there photos. And yes, I made the stupid Moother?s Day joke as I snapped the picture. Hope your Mother?s Day was filled full of fun too.

My friend Adam and his fiance Jessica came to visit from Iowa this past weekend. What a wonderful weekend we had. Both of my kids just loved Jessica to pieces. Emily just wanted to play and play with her and Kelly even learned how to play a card game called Cucumber. Anyone who knows Kelly will be amazed by this since she has never shown interest in card games before. As if our visitors were not enough to excite the kids but they also brought along their Nintendo DS with two ‘big brain’ games. Both of the girls thought that the DS and these games were very cool. The brain games are all about testing your metal abilities with short mental mini-games. I was amazed at how well Emily caught on to the DS and some of her skills bordered on just kind of creepy. I seriously do not know how she was getting the correct answers on some of them.

On Saturday we decided to have a little Geocaching fun. Adam loves to hike and we had hiked the Crags trail last year when he came to visit and our plan was to hike it again this year. However, Adam was feeling just a little under the weather so we scaled down our plans. We instead decided to shorten the Crags hike a bit by finding a geocache that was only a little ways along the trail. At the very least we would enjoy the drive up into the mountains as the aspens were just about ready to turn.

We started off by heading up to Divide Colorado where we were going to try and find a cache called R.I.P. Cache. This might not surprise you to learn that we found ourselves standing in a very old cemetery. I handed the GPS to Adam and it didn’t take long for him to find the location. Well, kind of. As soon as he got the the zero location the GPS would jump to 40 feet away. As you started off in the new direction it would jump and tell you to go back. Very odd behavior for the GPS. One might think that a spirit was playing games with us. Either way, Mary managed to stumble on to the cache as Adam and I pondered our spooky delema.

Next we headed to the Crags Trail Head where we would try to find the Crag Camp Cache. We were dumb founded at all the cars in the parking lot. Adam and I have been here several times before and never have we seen more than just a few cars. The lot was packed. I guess everyone else can feel the fact that winter is coming in a major way and were out trying to see the aspens before it was to late. We headed up the trail once we found a spot. The trail wound it’s way along a little stream where we stopped for a few photo shoots. Before long we were nearing the cache. We found ourselves standing at the bottom of a very steep hill with some large rock bluffs looming above us. The girls stayed below and Adam and I picked our way up the hill. We are very lucky that we had read the other cacher’s entries because their comments proved very helpful. The cache was easily 40 feet away from the zero point. We did manage to locate it however nestled in a crack at the base of the rock bluff. Next we picked our way back down to the girls, did the exchange and climbed back up. On the way back up we stopped and really apprecited how thin the air was here. The GPS said that we were almost exactly two miles high.

As we were heading out for our caching adventure Adam spied a caterpillar crawling next to the drive way. We thought it would be cool to show Emily so Mary hopped out of the car and tried to coral it. This proved to be difficult so Adam helped. Once they brought it over for Emily and I to see I understood why. First of all, this caterpillar was huge. It had very short brown hair with little blue spots that lined its body. It had a black and yellow strip that divided it’s front section from it’s rear section. The coolest part was when you tapped it’s rear end it would rare up on its hind quarter and extend it’s antena. It made the little guy look very daunting indeed! We snapped some photos and manged to identify him as a Western Tiger Swallowtail.

As you can plainly see from this article that while life is a journey, the journy is always better with friends. I would like to thank Adam and Jessica for visiting. I really appreciate the fact that they flew out here just to visit. Thanks guys!

I hope everyone was able to enjoy their labor day as much as I did today. Today Emily and I set off to Fox Run park for a picnic, geocache, and just some crazy park playing.

Yesterday Emily and I went geocaching and along the way we picked up a travel bug. A travel bug is a item placed into a cache that you can not keep, but is rather trying to reach some goal. You can identify the bug online and read about it. The bug we found yesterday was called Greggie Bug. This bug’s goal was to travel to all the fun places a young man would like to see. Without a doubt, Fox Run park is one of my family’s favorite parks. So Emily and I set out to find a geocache that we could release the travel bug back into the wild.

Before we started searching for the geocache, Emily and I had a picnic at one of the little ponds at the park. While we were eating our “Daddy Dinner” of cold pizza and vanilla wafers we saw two boys hanging out at the edge of the pond. They appeared to be catching something and were quite excited about it. Upon closer inspection these boys were catching crawdads. If I had to venture a guess, this was not the first time these two hoodlems have ransacked a population of crawdads. Their technique was amazing.

First the boys would take a fishing stringer and shove a one inch piece of hotdog on the end of it. They would then set the hotdog on the end of the strinnger into the pond just deep enough so that you could just barely see the hotdog. Then they would wait until a crawdad crawled up from the deep to eat the hot dog. Once the crawdad was munching along, one boy would slowly drag the crawdad closer to the edge of the pond. Meanwhile the other boy would slowly place a net behind the crawdad. When the crawdad got wise to the fact he was approaching the edge of the pond he would shoot backwards … right into the other boys net. Very clever! All in all I think we watched them catch at least a dozen crawdads while we had our lunch.

After our lunch we set off in search of Discovery Kids Cache hidden somewhere in Fox Run park. Just recently a new school has been built in this area called Discovery Canyon and several students from this school placed this cache. Emily and I had a delightful walk though the pine forest on our hunt for the cache. As we got closer, I let Emily do all of the searching and it didn’t take long before she had found it. Emily was so excited because she found a brand new box of crayons in this cache. We sure hope that “Greggie” would have appreciated this park. We sure do.

 

 

 

 

Geocaching. For those of you out there that do not know what geocaching is I thought I would start off with a brief description. When I was around five years old, on some nameless hot muggy day in the middle of Iowa, I would dream of finding buried treasure. Some times my neighbor friends would come over and we would draw out a crude map of the back yard, make an X at some random location and then grab Dad’s shovels from the garage. We would toil away in the backyard digging a hole on the thin hope that maybe, just maybe this time we would find treasure. We never found our booty but oddly enough, Dad would always find the holes when he would mown the lawn. Usually not before the riding lawn mower sunk up to it’s axle.

Geocaching was created for guys like me. People start by hiding a ‘cache’ somewhere filled with little items like happy meal toys, coins, stickers, etc. They use their GPS device to get it’s exact location and then they publish the name and coordinates of the cache on the Internet at www.geocaching.com. Then guys like me, looking for some way to spend the afternoon, will take the coordinates off the Internet and try to find the hidden booty. Once located, I will sign my name in the log book located inside the cache and then I will take one of the small trinkets from the cache as my prize for finding it. I will then leave a small trinket of my own choosing for the next guy. In this way a cache will always contain a handfull of goodies that are always changing.

There are several different types of geocaches that you can find as well. What I just described is a traditional geocache. For the people that like a difficult challenge and do not care about the “booty” exchange, there are micro caches. These are very small caches, usually about the size of a camera film container, that contain only a roll of paper and a stub of a pencil. These are very hard to find due to their size.

If you get into the geocaching thing and you find yourself disappointed once you find the cache because it is over, you can try a multi-cache. The coordinates posted on the Internet are the location of the first step in this cache. Once you find the first cache, it will tell you the coordinates of the next, and so on. Who knows how long you will be hunting and where the adventure will finally take you. Rest assured, you will eventually find a cache full of booty.

Do you like to collect things? How about collecting travel bugs? A travel bug is a small item found in a cache that is attached to a dog tag. The dog tag is marked with a unique number. When you find a travel bug, you may not keep it but rather you take it home and look it up on the web site. Each travel bug has a story and a goal. You then try to help this bug achieve it’s goal when you next set it free. Some are trying to reach a location. Others are just trying to meet new people. Either way, snap a photo of your bug because once you set it free you probably won’t see it again.

And all that is just for beginners. There are traditional caches, multicaches, puzzle caches, virtual caches, webcam caches, reverse caches, earth caches, travel bugs, geocoins, and jeep bugs just to name a few.Emily and I decided that today was the perfect day for hunting geocaches. It has been raining here on the weekends a lot lately and today was beautiful. The first cache we tried to find was Any Witz Way You Can (Secret Trail). It was located a few miles north of my house in the briorgate area. We drive around the neighborhood for a while but we keep hitting dead ends. We finally spotted a sidewalk that went to a walking area behind the houses. We know that had to be the way so we started the hunt. We found ourselves a beautiful green space that had a very well groomed trail. After a short walk we found the cache hidden in a clump of trees. It was a great cache too! It appeared to be brand new with lots of great toys.

The next cache we located was called Flutter’s Fortune and it was close by. It just so happens that this cache was right off a road that I drive on my way to work. Who knew? This cache was in a little green area off of a paved walking trail. As we were walking up a steep hill, I kept eyeing a very over grown section to my left. I kept thinking, “Please don’t be in there, Please don’t be in there”. Yep, sure enough it was. Emily and I had to pick our way through weeds for about 60 feet until we game to this “MASSIVE” bush/weed looking thing. The GPS told me I had to head in to find the treasure so Emily waited outside while I poked my head in. It was really quite cool. Once you climbed into the giant bush thingy it was like being in a cave that I could almost stand up in. There in plain sight, once you navigated into the bush, was the cache. I grabbed it and brought it out so Emily and I could plunder it.

The last cache of the day was located just south of my house on the Homestead Trail. This paved trail cuts though all of the neighborhoods just west of Powers. I have ran this trail several times, but I did not know there were any caches on it until today. This cache was called Kemah’s Cache and we found it with little trouble. As we were leaving this cache Emily and I talked about what a great day of caching we had.