Geocaching with "thepaytons"

For some Spring Break vacations, we stay at my folks’ “snowbird” place in Florida, and we’re doing that this year.  Before leaving, I had to see what caches were near the place and near the beaches we frequent.  Today we went to one of the beaches and I made sure to park near where a couple of the caches were.

We went to Coquina Beach, our favorite spot, and at one point I took some of the kids across the road to search for the first cache.  Its location is visible from the road but if you approach it properly, you can’t be seen that well from passing cars.

After a short search, my son found it; a small black bison tube with a log in it.  We signed the log, and continued on.

The next one was very near by, and we figured, we’ll never be closer to it than we are now, so off we went.

This part of the island has walking trails, and the cache location was, fortunately, rather close the the path.  While hidden nicely, my daughter had no trouble finding it.  This cache was one that we could have made a trade in, but alas we’d left our signature “boondoggles” back in the van.  So “took nothing, left nothing, signed log” (or TNLNSL for cachers).

One the items in here was a “trackable“; an item that is also tracked at geocaching.com.  For these, people log where they’ve found them, picked them up, and in what cache they’ve dropped them off.  Most have a “mission”; some just to travel far and wide, some to go to a certain place, some to be photographed at certain locations, etc.  The trackable we found in this cache was one who’s mission was to either catch up with another travel bug or return to Florida.  This trackable was a pair of “glass slippers” trying to catch up with one called “the Charmings” (get it?).  However, since it had just returned to Florida a couple days ago (from Alaska!), we decided to leave it where it was.

Upon leaving the beach, the traffic getting off the island was at a slow crawl, so we decided to pull over on the side of the road near where I knew there was another cache with trackables that we would be able to do something with.  Armed with one of our boondoggles, we launched off into the bushes, no doubt with some drivers passing by wondering what was going on.  Fortunately the tall bushes gave us cover enough that the muggles couldn’t see what we were doing.

This one was more difficult to find.  Again, avoiding spoilers, but I will say that it was a very ingenious hide, and it put to good use Daddy’s #1 Rule Regarding Finding Easter Eggs (apropos, since tomorrow is Easter); don’t always look down. My older son finally found it, and we picked up one trackable who’s mission is to be photographed at as many lakes and reservoirs as possible.  We plan to bring it back to Georgia and find a body of water for it, perhaps around Stone Mountain.

We finally got to leave our signature boondoggle as well.

We replace the cache properly, got back in the van, and left having had much more fun that we would have just sitting in traffic (and not having lost all that much time, frankly).