The girls and I stepped up our geocaching experience last weekend by hiding our first geocaches.  I took Katlyn and Jaimee to the dollar store, where they picked out the box for their caches, some stickers to decorate them, some little toys to hide inside, and the notebook and pencil for the logbook.  After putting together their caches and selecting a name (Katlyn chose “The Sharing Cache” and Jaimee chose “The Worm Cache”) we set out to find a good hiding place.  First up was Jaimee, who said she wanted to hide hers near where she takes swimming lessons. We went for a hike in the park behind the Milton Leisure Center and hid it under a tree.  Katlyn wanted to find somewhere near her school so we went for a walk on the trails behind EW Foster and found a good dead tree to hide it in.

We submitted the caches to geocaching.com and awaited blessing from the site reviewers.  On 10:30am the next morning the caches were published and by noon several groups were already out hunting for them.  Turns out that I transposed a couple of numbers in the coordinates for Katlyn’s cache and four different people were out looking in the wrong spot for it in vain.  Oops!  I corrected it quickly and by 2:30pm someone had made the “first to find” log entry.

By the next day we had received several reports from people who were out hunting for the caches including comments like “nice decoration girls”.  After seeing all of the activity, I started to get jealous and wanted a cache of my own as well.  So I went back to the dollar store and picked up some magnetic key-hiding cases and set up my own cache.  I decided to hide it in the park behind our old house, and as I was hunting for a good spot I noticed a young family out on their back deck who were looking at me suspiciously.  I decided it would be in my best interest to let them in on the game rather than have them call the police on the creepy guy wandering around the playground.  After telling them about geocaching, they basically insisted that I hide the cache on their fenceline so that they could watch people tyring to find it.  I happily obliged.

You can see the caches I’ve hidden and associated comments, pictures, etc here:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?u=pnear

I’ve also been out geocaching on the Bruce Trail with Jaimee, in Cleveland with my coworker Bob, and just yesterday in Providence Rhode Island.