For Christmas Mike very generously gave me a Garmin Nuvi GPS receiver so I can stop getting lost whenever I try and drive anywhere. I’d heard of geocaching, where you try and locate hidden “caches” using GPS coordinates, but only recently became really interested after a friend told me about some of his geocaching exploits. Now that I had a GPS receiver, I decided to give it a try.

Last night Elise, Lauren and I formed the Treit Geocaching Club. We wrote up a detailed constitution. Here’s a flavor of the document:

Goals of the Club

1. Have fun
2. Explore new areas
3. Learn
4. Clean up the environment

Rules of the Club

1. The club shall consist of a Club President and Members
2. Club decisions shall be decided by vote. In the event of a tie vote, the Club President shall decide
3. Club members may geocache without other club members only if the other members are unavailable or don’t feel like going
4. Good attitudes are required when on a cache hunt. Uttering the words “I’m bored” or a similar sentiment is grounds for expulsion from the club.
5. The club shall practice “Cache In Trash Out”

We all had a great time with a map spread out on the kitchen table last night, learning about latitude and longitude.

This afternoon it was off to find our first cache.

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Our first target was a cache called “Deer Tracks” which is quite close to home. After braving some sticker bushes and making our way into the woods, we spent a lot of time fruitlessly digging around a big cedar tree before I realized that while I thought my Garmin was showing us at the coordinates, we were actually about fifty feet away. Once we got to the correct spot, it only took a couple minutes of searching to find the cache. We were all very excited!

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Elise and Lauren with our first Cache.

After signing the log with my geocaching.com handle (rtreit), Elise took a matchbox car from the cache and replaced it with a toy deer (for deer tracks, naturally).

After a trip to the post office and a celebratory cookie from the Sky River Bakery, the girls wanted to try “just one more.” I had loaded a number of caches into my GPS, so I pointed us at the nearest one and off we went to try and find cache number two.

This was an interesting location, a small little park that I had no idea existed just past our church. Elise and Lauren had fun climbing the big cherry tree while I honed in on the coordinates.

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This was a micro cache, just big enough for the log book. It was cleverly hidden, and I won’t give away the secret.

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Of course, after nailing two caches, we couldn’t just stop there. Next up, another micro-cache out on Chain Lake road. Elise and Lauren picked up litter while I worked the GPS unit.

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Soon we had number three in the bag. We were starting to feel like experts.

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With cries of “one more! one more!” I dutifully headed down a small road that ended in a concrete barrier and some kind of trail. It was getting dark and I was having some trouble with the GPS signal. We spent a lot of time searching around the barrier but finally had to admit defeat. We’ll be back for another go at this one soon!