Adventures with Teenagers

One of my churchkids turned 16 yesterday and her parents allowed her to take today off to go to the DMV and get her license. Another of them goes to an Episcopal school and today was the last day of their Easter holiday. We hooked up for lunch around 1 and then we were off for an afternoon of geocaching. Yay!

It was interesting playing the leader for a new driver trying to follow in city traffic. She did well. We managed to pick up 6 caches today between 2 and 4:30.

Our first stop was "Mama Mia" which we'd gone after without success on Saturday. We'd been searching for a micro and completely overlooked the nano that was the actual hide. I'd never seen a nano "in the wild" before. Those things give a new meaning to the word evil. In a good way of course.

One of the neat things about this trip was that, totally by chance, none of the containers was alike and all the hides were very different. It was a great learning experience for me regarding the variety of hides that are out there in our urban environment.

From "Mama Mia" we went to "Butterflies". This was in a neat little "pocket park" that I had no idea existed. The container here was a metal candle or spice can and it is not handling the weather well. The log was soaked. I posted a needs maintanence log on this one and I'm hoping the cache owner will take care of it because its a really nice location.

Next it was on to "Sudoku Challenge - Hard". I was glad to have the younger, lighter people with me because I'm too old and too heavy to be climbing trees. It was a nice hide. ML took one of cgeek's wood geocoins, I already have one in my collection. cgeek's kind of a celebrity around our crew...we love her hides, evil though they may be. We left a mint tin that I'd been saving for an "evil micro" container in homage to the queen of the "evil micros".

Our next hunt takes the prize for biggest comedy of errors and I truly hope we didn't manage to get another of cgeeks caches muggled. *crosses fingers and prays hard* We went after "Marquett Park". It was a beautiful day and the muggles were everywhere, including sitting right at Ground Zero. I asked ML to stop and tie her shoe and check to see if the cache was where I thought it was planning to come back later and grab it when someone wasn't sitting right on top of it. Something got lost in translation though because she tried for it and got caught. The lady thought she'd stolen her cell phone! After much explaining and showing of the cache container, the GPSr and the cache pages we were able to convince her otherwise. We replaced the cache without further incident and the people there weren't inclined to take it but I'm still paranoid that it will end up gone and we will once again be the last people to "see it alive." Note to self - DO NOT Take teenagers on Stealth Required missions. Just don't.

"745 - CACHE" was left for another day. At least teenagers do learn. There was just too much muggle activity in the area to get it today, although we're certain of its location. It will wait for another time.

"A Walk In The Park" yielded a unique hide combining a carabiner and a decon container. When we opened the cache we found among the swag the dreaded used golf ball so we took that. We left an easter button and a pencil sharpener shaped like a small wrench. We figured that for a used golf ball we were definitely trading up. :)

We ended our day like we started it, with one of cgeek's evil micros, "On The Perimeter". This was one of my favorite hides of the day. The tiny bison tube could have easily been mistaken by the unobservant as some kind of cocoon. Very creative hide and in an area that we really didn't have to worry too much about muggle activity.

All in all it was a lovely day. Good hunting, good friends, good weather. Who could ask for more?