My second new adventure happened on the last night of our Hume Lake family camping trip! While sitting around camp after dinner, our oldest son, David, produced an odd looking little device and asked, "Do you want to go 'treasure hunting'?"
The little 'machine' in his hand was a GPS devise that is used for a new (VERY new to me!) hobby called 'geo-caching' The idea is to enter some coordinates that you get off of a website and away you go, hunting for a little 'treasure' that another 'geo-cacher' has previously hidden. Before we headed up to Hume Lake, David had checked to see if there were any geo-caches in the Hume Lake area, and sure enough there were! There were 2 geo-caches near the dam, not far from our campground, and those were the ones we were going to hunt for!
Our little devise kept giving us directions and distances and soon we were very near the first 'treasure'...within feet of it! And so the hunt was on!! We all begin searching under rocks, in trees, in crevices...anywhere a treasure could be hidden. Our youngest daughter, Anna, was the first to spot the treasure, but she kept it a secret, hoping I would find it since this was one of my '60 new adventures'. After just a few more minutes, and a few clues from Anna, the treasure was found, some screaming was heard, and the fun continued as we opened the treasure and checked out it's contents!
One of the coolest contents of this first treasure was a 'travel bug', a small metal tag attached to a cute little Matchbox National Parks SUV. We soon learned from David, that 'travel bugs' are fairly rare and to find one in our first geo-cache was VERY lucky!! This travel bug started it's journey on June 30, 2007 somewhere in California (I haven't been able to figure that out yet!), and we will soon be putting it in another geo-cache that we find to send it on it's journey. I have ordered a 'travel bug' for us to stow away in a 'treasure' that we are hoping to hide for some other lucky geo-cachers to find.
After finding our first geo-cache, we put in the coordinates for the second 'treasure' and we were off on another hunt. It didn't take long to find our next cache, and again, Anna was the 'treasure hunter' to spot it first! Our grandson, Micah, loved checking out what was in each 'treasure' and was a very good 'hunter'!!
After our first experience with geo-caching, Gary and I were hooked! We recently purchased our own GPS device and are planning on taking it with us to Morro Bay this week to hunt for more "treasures"!!!
We had a blast Mom! I hope it will be a fun thing for you and Dad and even the grandkids for years to come.
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