Geocoin travels to Germany

It's been a while since I've blogged about geocaching, and I'm hoping to do some more in the fall when the weather gets cooler. But today I found out that our geocoin has travelled to Germany. A geocoing is a special coin made for geocaching with a unique code on it. The owner of the coin logs the coin and its code at Geocaching.com and then places it in a cache. When someone finds the cache, they can take the coin with them and place it in another cache. And the next person takes it to another cache and so on. Each person who moves the coin logs an entry at Geocaching.com so we can follow its trip. We placed our coin in a cache in Charlotte last year. It travelled around Charlotte for a while, then made it to the mountains, then Illinois. Someone in Illinois found it and logged that they were going to take it to Germany. We hadn't heard from it for a while, but I just got news today that someone found it in a cache in Germany! The log entry is in German and Casey doesn't remember any of his German from college, so we don't really know what it says. I guess I need to use BabelFish to translate it. Anyway, woo-hoo to our geocoin!

A refresher for those who don't remember my earlier caching posts:
A treaure hunt
The curse of the pirates' treasure

The Curse of the Pirates' Treasure

Last Friday we bundled up the kids and went off in search of pirates' treasure.  It was an all day adventure as we had to first find the treasure map and collect all 8 of the clues to finish the map. Geocaching is fun because it takes you to places you might not ever know about otherwise.  The first half of our treasure hunt took us to the Gold Hill Mine Historical Park, where I learned that North Carolina was the main gold mining state until the California gold rush.  After lunch we found the rest of the clues at a Boys and Girls Club campground.  Once we had all the clues, we used the map and the clues to decipher the coordinates for the last cache - the treasure!  Coulson got a little toy police car and Charlie took a bouncy ball (of course).  And we left some of our own little toys for someone else to enjoy.

Going after some pirates' treasure!

We learned a lot about geocaching that day, especially that when the GPSr shows that the cache is still several hundred feet away, it helps to stick to the trail even when the arrow is pointing directly to your left or right.  Many times we headed directly into the woods with some difficult terrain, especially when hiking with kids, only to find that the original trail winded back around to a spot closer to the cache.  (And silly us, we're still learning this lesson, as we did a lot of extra hiking when we were out caching yesterday as well!) 

Then on Saturday, we visited my brother and his family.  We took them geocaching, too.  It was fun to share our new hobby with them and I think the kids had a lot of fun looking for the hidden box and then choosing a toy to keep.  Thankfully we found a cache that was full of toys (or McToys, as they're called, since the "treasures" are often a Happy Meal toy or something of similar value).  Some caches just have small grown-up stuff (keychains, etc.) so finding one full of toys added to the fun for the kids.  And of course I forgot to take pictures of the kids finding the box!  Maybe I'll remember next time. 

And then, as I said, we went caching again on Sunday.  The weather was just too beautiful and, as I noted in a previous post, Coulson's not crazy about playgrounds.  So geocaching is the perfect way to get outside.  We're hoping that this helps Coulson get more excited about being outdoors.  We haven't been able to go camping as much as we would have liked - Casey's residency schedule didn't give us much time for weekend getaways - so Coulson's not as accustomed to "roughing it" as we would like.  But we're hoping to do more camping in the future and it would be a big bummer if the boys didn't like it.

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