New Cachers - the Relatives

We took my uncle in law and his two sons geocaching for their first time yesterday. I am incredibly jealous of his Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. Wow does that put my little unit without a firewire to shame.

We hit Wescott Station Park behind the Thomson Reuters building in Eagan because there are four caches all within walking distance of each other. I'd been out there before. It's where the locals tried to call the cops on me because I wasn't supposed to park my car down there, despite the plowed road and lack of a "Do Not Go This Way to the Egress" sign. Last time I couldn't find three of the four caches. Which might have been a sign that it wasn't an optimal place to take first time cachers, but I thought a little bit of wilderness would be a good thing. And that initial frustration over night finding a cache can get you motivated to cache more often.

We found three out of four. The King of the Hill eluded us, as it did me last time I was there with my arm shoved up a tree, and as it did to The Boss when he was out there. But we found Down in the Valley, which was a real poser in the winter. And I found the one across the stream with the older not-a-nephew, which was enough work to make it rewarding. We had to hump it through some grass that was up to my shoulder (over his head), cross a little stream, brave ticks and mosquitoes, and get the heck scared out of us by a deer we never saw, only heard crashing and huffing in the brush. That was the event that convinced the younger not-a-nephew (NaN) and uncle to head back to the playground where my wife and daughter were hanging.

Here's Eryn, me and the Uncle coming up out of the valley. Note the t-shirt I claimed my blog helped me find in the last post. There were quite a few woodticks right here. Imagine that.


The not-a-nephews rooting around for a cache. Which is strange, because there wasn't one here. I'm not entirely sure what they were looking for, but they seem very intent, and you can't practice your searching skills too much. Maybe there's a cache disguised as a flower. They did learn that you should always search for a path first, as we trudged up the brush littered hillside to one cache, only to find an intersecting trail at the top. That's always frustrating and rewarding at the same time. You feel like you did it the hard way.


Down in the Valley. You can see why it might have been a problem to find it in the winter. I think it was 99% luck and 1% GPS that allowed me to find the container. It was guarded by a vicious band of tiny ants who had taken up residence in it's wood. Geocants. The enemies of all who Geo Can. The ants go marching three by three, hurrah, hurrah. The ants go marching three by three, hurrah, hurrah. The ants go marching three by three, the little one stops to put a cache in the tree, and they all go marching down, into the fake microcache tree bit, to get out of the rain, boom, boom, boom!