Some modest milestones

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game using a GPS, and it’s our latest family hobby. You can find out more about geocaching by reading the FAQs and also on wikipedia. Our family loves being outdoors and exploring this beautiful state, and so geocaching is something we can all enjoy together.

The kids particularly like finding caches and rifling through all the toys and treasures in the cache. Jacob and Megan are getting to be expert spotters and can usually find a cache if we can get them to within 20 feet. I’m becoming very adept at knowing the general location of the cache from a distance, and Manina prides herself in finding caches everyone else has given up on. We make a pretty good team, although it can be awkward when other non-geocachers (muggles) are watching you trying to figure out what you’re up to. Once, I got accused of being part of an elaborate drug-smuggling operation.

We hit a few geocaching milestones on our trip to sunny St. George this last weekend.

On the drive down, we picked up a couple caches when we stopped for bathroom breaks. It helped break up the four hour drive and gave the kids something to look forward to.

Friday afternoon the whole family went out with Uncle Matt (who now lives in St. George). We found a couple cool caches with him, four of them on a fun mile-long hike up a dry riverbed. We never would have known about the hike without having the geocaches to chase after.

On Saturday we found our 100th cache. That’s the first milestone for a newbie cacher. It was a cool cache with lot of fun toys, and it was buried in a sprinkler box out in the middle of nowhere. We also went back to Anasazi Ridge and let the whole crew play around on the rocks while I found a nearby geocache. We then traveled over to Snow Canyon and played around in the park. The State Park service maintains a geocache they’ve hidden in the park, and they even stock it with souvenirs. We grabbed that one and let the kids wear themselves out. We didn’t go to the sand dunes like the first time we went to Snow Canyon, but decided to hike around in some of the other areas of that cool place.

On Saturday night, we decided to celebrate our 100th geocache in style — we created our first geocache hide. It’s only about a half a mile away from Grandpa Gary’s place, and pretty well hidden in a rock wall.

As we drove back Sunday, we grabbed a few more geocaches on the way. As we pulled into our driveway we commented how having a few geocaches to find during a long roadtrip sure made the miles go by much faster. Geocaching is a fun family hobby that doesn’t cost any money (after you buy a GPS) and has certainly given us many hours of entertainment and shown us places of our great state we may never have visited otherwise.