Geocaching with "thepaytons"

While I happened to have our entire brood in town, we decided to go to a nearby mall to visit a niece of mine and just window shop. Nearby was a geocache, so we brought along a travel bug we’d picked up recently to drop off.

This one is located in tall grass by a retainer pond across the street from the mall. Clearly, they have beavers here.

My GPS was giving us fits, but I’d recalled the general area I saw on the map where the cache was, so we checked it out.

While Mommy watched us look all around, she did a little looking and found it herself, so we all headed over.

While it’s a nice cache that will stand up to the weather, it won’t handle a moderately sized traveler.

So we took nothing, left nothing, and signed the log.

One of the reasons I wanted to place our first cache at church was because we’re there very often and I would have many opportunities to check on the box itself and see if it needed maintenance. One of the problems with caches is that their owners don’t check on them, and, as with many things, water is a cache’s worst enemy.  Sometimes they get wet and yucky, the log book is soaked so you cant’ sign it, and the swag inside is moldy. I didn’t want one of my caches to get ignored, so I checked it out. It had been a bit of time since I had, and we’d had a few rainstorms in the interim. Sure enough, either the waterproof box is, instead, water resistant, or the lid wasn’t properly closed a time or two.

The packaging for the yo-yo (which included instructions) was covered in mold and, with the dampness, had opened up. The crayons looked very suspect, and the Atlanta Braves parking receipt was beyond hope (and not very healthy to be near, I imagine). So the yo-yo packaging a those two other items just had to get thrown out.

I got out some cleaner with bleach and we wiped down everything else that could be saved.

I also got as much of the mold as I could off the inside and outside of the box.

Having thrown some things out, we replenished the cache, put the log book in a new bag, and packed it up to be placed back in its spot tomorrow.

If you have a cache, please do regular maintenance. And for those of you who do maintenance on other peoples’ caches that you find need them, many thanks.

With 3 of my kids away for the summer (one at college for the summer semester and two working at a summer camp), my youngest is certainly a bit lonely. So today we decided to go out to do some geocaching together; something he’s been looking forward to.

First, a weather report. It hadn’t rained for quite some time in our area, and indeed drought conditions were starting to take hold. But this afternoon we finally got a nice pop-up thunderstorm that indeed hung around for about 30 minutes. The good news is, we needed it. The bad news is, it hampered our geocaching, even hours after it had left.

Our first stop was at an antique store behind which was a cache.

The problem was that the cache location seemed to be in a bunch of bushes, but after the rain, my son was not interested in poking through wet bushes, so we went on to our next stop.

This was at a Lutheran church, and the name of the cache is "Ninety-Five Thesis"; rather appropriate.

But again the wet foliage slowed us down. We did get into what we thought was the zone, but after a short look around, we moved on.

The next stop I wanted to  make was at the home of the cacher nicknamed "Flamingomama". As of this date, she’s hidden 68 caches, many around this area, and we’ve found some of them. I reminded my son of some of the caches of hers that we’d found. Less than a month ago, she hid a cache in her front yard, so we decided to look for it and hopefully meet her.

When we arrived, there was no question we were at the right place.

We knocked on the door, but alas, no one was home. So off we went into her front yard to look for the ammo can hidden there.

After a short search, my son did indeed find it. We opened it up and the container was quite full of stuff.

There was a trackable inside, and so we took it to move it along, and left some spooky, glow-in-the-dark press-on nails; a gag gift from last Christmas.

My son signed the log, saying that we were sorry to have missed them, and then re-hid the can.

Now, see, we have to go out again some time to move the trackable, so that guarantees another geocaching hunt.