Geocaching – Summer Trip Part 4

I can’t finish the recap of our summer trip without mentioning the geocaching adventures we had. Don’t know what geocaching is? Go check here.

Dan bought a smart phone app for geocaching, and it has totally changed our ability to geocache. While we were on our summer road trip, we stopped in every state and found a cache. We started the trip with only two states under our geocaching belt. We finished with twelve!

Our first cache of the trip was in Metropolis, Illinois. Katie found this one after we searched around and around City Hall.

Our second cache was in a parking lot outside a Toys R Us store in Kentucky. We were stumped, until Katie had the brilliant idea to look under a piece of the light pole. Aha!

The third find was at a rest stop in Tennessee.

The fourth cache was a doozie. It was hidden extremely well in a parking lot near Stone Mountain, Georgia, and our entire family searched for a good 25 minutes in the heat. Three of us gave up, but Dan was determined to find it and went back armed with two extra GPSs, plus his smart phone app. He finally found it when a nice man nearby helped him see “the light.” (Pun intended.)

Dan found our fifth cache of the trip near a Starbucks in Marietta, Georgia. Katie put it back in its secret hiding spot.

All four of us found this sixth cache in the woods near a South Carolina rest stop.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a photo of the seventh cache that Dan and Katie found in North Carolina. (They were out hunting without me and Jackson!)

The eighth cache was Just Off the Exit of Interstate 77 in Chiswell, Virginia.

For the ninth cache, Dan gave me the smart phone compass and told me to find it. I am really bad at orienteering, so I dragged Katie down a muddy hill before he course-corrected me and led us to the cache. It was buried in leaves in West Virginia.

We should have stopped with nine caches, but decided to cross into Ohio for what we thought would be a quick stop to get our Ohio geocache badge. Uh, WRONG! We went a little too far out of the way and ended up selecting a cache that was hidden near some poison ivy. I think we avoided the poison ivy pretty well, but ended up adding at least an hour to our already LONG drive home from North Carolina. But, hey! We EARNED that badge and found the darn thing in a cemetery in Coal Grove, Ohio.

Whew. And THAT is our summer trip, geocache style!