Geocaching with "thepaytons"

We set out to find 3 caches today, found them all, and then went to a fourth one on the spur of the moment (it was on our way back) which had eluded us 3 previous times, and we found that as well. Very satisfying.

First stop, "Celestal Moola" near a small lake called Lake Lucerne. This was a small parking area right on the lake and right off a rather busy divided highway.

The GPS showed that the spot was close to the water, but in fact it was a bit farther back. We started looking under the bridge and through the thorny scrub brush.

My youngest son had noticed a small path earlier and wandered down it a bit, but came back empty-handed. My older son finally decided to take a look himself and did find the cache.

 

Not too much in the cache itself, so we took nothing, left nothing and signed the log.

This was a beautiful day for caching.

We moved on to our next stop, at a church just down the highway. It’s a cache that highlights one of the special projects done by Eagle Scouts in the area, one for each of the virtues of the Boy Scout Law. As we approached it, my older son recognized one of the Eagle projects at this site that he helped out with; not the one specifically mentioned on the cache page, but the benches that were built very close to the cache location.

It didn’t take long for my oldest son to find this one, and again, in a place that my youngest son had already looked. (It was frustrating for him, let me tell you.) We brought it over to look through it.

There were some nice little things in there. We didn’t take anything, but we left the trackable we found yesterday. It was called "4Given" and it seemed like a church was a good place to drop it.

And on we went.

The next cache had a particular location, but noted that it was to be moved for a short time. We started looking at the original location, but it was no longer someplace you could reasonably hide anything.

After deciding that we’d have seen it if it was here, we went for the alternate location, which was in a grove of trees. It was easier to look through, I imagine, in winter with all the leaves off the trees.

My younger daughter found it pretty quickly once we got close.

We found a small flashlight-type toy to take. In previous photos, you notice that my older son was wearing a bracelet made of soda can tabs. He brought that in case we wanted to drop it off in a cache, and so we dropped it off here.

We signed the log and started back home.

On our way home, we were going by a cache we’d tried (at least) 3 times before to find. We figured the lack of leaves might help us here, too.

Well, indeed we found it within a couple of minutes, and in a place we’d searched before, but not because it was winter. No spoilers! This time, my oldest found it.

Signed the log, and finished a fantastic day, having gone out looking for 3 and found 4.