Geocaching with "thepaytons"

Fortunately you don’t have to go crawling around in a sewer to find this one.  There are a few rainwater drains and pipes underneath the roads at this corner, however, which all suggested hiding places. 

With his older siblings otherwise occupied (one at college, one visiting a college and one washing cars as a fund raiser), I took my youngest on a hunt of his own.  Our first finds were without him around because, during that part of Christmas vacation, he was staying at the grandparents place nearby where his NY cousins were staying.  So I thought I’d give him a hunt of his own.

I was trying to use my Blackberry as both GPS and camera, so I’d get a general idea of distance, switch to camera, then back to the GPS, and realize we were still a bit off from ground zero.  So we were looking all over the place at the start.

But we finally got our bearings, and found the "sewer" it was talking about.  Actually a telephone cable access point.

He found the small electrical-tape-covered cylinder, but when we took the cap off the log book was soaked.  So we just took pictures to record, for ourselves, the find.

We dutifully rolled it back up and put it back in its place.  We then logged the find on the website.  Good job for the kiddo!

And one of them was accidental!

We took a family trip to McDaniel Farm Park in Duluth, GA today.  My wife wanted to see if it would be a good place for a field trip for her class of kids reading Little House on the Prairie, and there were 4 caches mentioned on the map at geocaching.com.  We parked the car and took in some of the exhibits before we headed out for some hunting.  (Rain was supposed to be coming in around 3pm, so we had — supposedly — over 2 hours before that happened.)

The cache closest to us was "Old McDaniel Had a Farm", and was slightly off the beaten track.

But once we narrowed down the search area, my youngest made his first find.

The cache was a farm themed one, meaning it had started with farming stuff, though it’s been a while so the items in there weren’t all that farm related.  But we helped out with that, leaving a seed packet and taking a foldable ‘frisbee’.

We followed our GPS to the next location, but while we were still apparently 200 feet from the cache, my oldest found something. 

Turned out it was our first letterbox find.  However, this wasn’t listed on the web site, so our stumbling across it was just that.  For this kind of cache, you bring a signature stamp along with you, stamp it in the log, and take the stamp from the box and make an impression in a log you bring along.  The stamp you see above, and there were quite a few in the log.

We left a note in the log to the effect of "sorry we didn’t have a stamp, but we found this by accident."  Very interesting, indeed.

A few minutes later, we did find our intended cache, titled "Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice".  As you may tell by the title, it was supposed to be a girls themed cache, but again trading had made it more generic.  In keeping with the theme, we left a bottle of nail polish, and took a camo bracelet (more a guy thing).  The log book was full, so we signed the back cover.

The rain started to come in quite a bit earlier than predicted, on and off, so we picked up the pace a bit.  The next one was near enough, with the GPS suggesting it was along side a nearby creek.

My younger daughter found this plastic peanut butter jar.  The contents looked a bit meager, so we just left a boondoggle without taking anything, and signed the damp log book.

For the final cache of the day, the kids went off on their own while us older folks took a rest.  They had a tough time finding it as the GPS kept throwing them all over the place.  But they finally found this cleverly concealed cache.  (And they took a camera with them.)

For this cache they took nothing and left nothing, since our bag of goodies that we brought along had been misplaced along the way, but they did sign the log.  They were impressed with a sticker that someone had put in a log with their geocaching info.

So a personal best for a day of caching.  After this, even the kids were tired out.  🙂