Happy Palindrome Day! It’s also Groundhog Day and Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow which means an early spring. It felt like spring today at 50°F! We went out to enjoy the spring-like weather by geocaching for the first time.

We found a park near our house that had 14 caches in it. We focused on 2 easier ones. The first one was called ‘The Toy Store”. Above you can see Cal holding the container. There wasn’t much exciting inside but we filled it up with stuff we brought from home for the next kids who find it.

If you haven’t heard of geocaching before, you use your phone or a GPS device and a geocaching app to find hidden treasure chests. These chests can be as big a large bucket (or bigger) and smaller than a film container…or anywhere in between. The basic rules are pretty simple. Replace any items you take from the cache (these items are called swag) with something equal or better. Try not to be seen by “muggles” aka people who don’t know about geocaching. A lot of people also follow a rule to pick up litter at the geocache sites as well. You’d probably get a better idea of what geocaching is by watching a YouTube video if you’re still interested.

We forgot to bring a water bottle. There were different opinions on whether or not it was safe to eat snow (I said yes, others said no) but it the end we ate a bunch. The second cache we found was called “The Jewelry Box” and it had a lot of really neat jewelry in it. I read the description of this one before leaving home so we brought some jewelry to put in this one in exchange for what we took.

After taking a break for lunch we decided to check a couple of urban caches. We checked ones that said they were “travel bug hotels” where people can put trackable metal tags. They have a code that you input into the app to see where it has been. Certain trackables, called travel bugs have a goal like “visit as many ice cream shops as possible” or a specific location like a city. You should only move travel bugs if you can further them on their mission.

We checked three of these “hotels” and didn’t find any trackables but we did get some other swag. The girls got a second wind during our urban geocaching. It was a little easier because there was less walking.

Although the snow on the ground made geocaching more challenging in some ways, it was also nice to not have to deal with tons of brush and bugs.

I forgot to take pictures but we saw hawks and geese, deer prints, deer poop and a live deer.  Cal found a dead shrew.  We don’t get outside much in winter so it was a nice change. We also enjoyed our first geocaching adventure. We plan to do some more on our trip out west.

That’s it for today except for a few pictures of the beautiful snow we got last weekend.