August 13, 2005 - Auburn, NH - 2

Ever been geocaching?  Well, check it out here to see if it's for you.  We're off on our 3rd search.  Well, it's my 3rd one, Barb's second one, and Carol and Guy's first ever.  The idea is this:  You pick up the coordinates of a cache from the website, put them into your handheld GPS, and then go find the cache based on those coordinates.  Simple enough.  At least it sounds simple.  The big deal for us is the walk in the woods.  Or wherever we are.  The game is played in every country in the world, including Iraq, by our military people.  The caches are usually put in places we'd not normally go.

I'm showing off the little e-Trex GPS we use; then at a memorial on the trail.  Now I'm showing Guy how the little triangle on the screen will move as I turn the unit around in my hand.  If you think it's nice and cool here on the shaded trail, you'd be mistaken.  It wasn't miserable, but it was sure hot enough for the 4 of us!

And, of course, there's always something else interesting to see on any trail we take.  This looks like some bug is making a meal out another bug, doesn't it.  And then after some poking around just a few feet off the trail, I lucked out and found the cache.  It's always sort of an unspoken challenge between Barb and I to find it first.

There's the cache peeking out at us from under that wood.  This one happens to be an ammo box, but others are plastic or whatever keeps the water out.  There's  the box sitting on the trail.  Barb fills out the log in there while I mess with the trinkets in the box deciding which to take.  I have a trinket from a prior find to leave here.  I'm being a bit vague on purpose as I don't want to spoil the cache for somebody who may be reading this and is a geocacher.  When we got home and I logged the find in, I discovered we were one of 3 people who found that cache that day.  We're still too new at it to really know if that's unusual or not.

Another view on the way down the trail, and it looked like the kids were having fun.  I wanted to join them to cool off, but opted instead to use my little $1 fan from Wal-Mart (a surprisingly effective little fan!) much to the amusement of my hiking partners.

Yeah, Barb was carrying the camera, why do you ask?  Some people think mushrooms are "cute".  Hummmm.  Yeah, I guess they are.....when they have moss on them.  Sort of.

OK, anybody know this little yellow guy that's climbing up my leg?  I'll bet our Canadian friend Tracey knows.  About the funniest bug we'd seen in a long time, made us think of a toothbrush with its bristles on top.  And since it cooled off a bit, we're having dinner outside at Carol and Guy's "camp".

How's this for "camp" food, eh?  Pepper steak sandwich and fit for a king!  Thanks for the great time, Guy and Carol.