Geocaching - GC305 - "Gravois Creek"

Since we had tech-savvy company in town, it was a foregone conclusion that we'd go geocaching!

So we packed four people and two dogs in tha Nite Rida and headed out to the Gravois Creek site.

And I learned that geocaching changes a lot when it's spring and things are growing.

For one, it's hot. And there's lots of stuff I'm allergic to out in the woods. I guess I already knew that, and I've been hiking during the summer plenty of times, but that first trip out when it's hot and itchy is never fun. Fine, I can deal with that.

But lots of stuff grows out in the woods. There are foot-tall weeds growing where there were only leaves when the cache stasher initially put out the cache. This means you have to be ready for some bushwhacking out in the thick.

And Julie and I wore shorts. Dumb.

The good news is that Chad and Kelly were smarter than that, and had on the long pants. Kelly went out off the trail about twenty feet, and found the cache in about three minutes. Rockstar.

There was some interesting stuff in this cache, but they decided to take a postcard of a hotel in India. They're learning Hindi and are planning to go to India sometime soon, so it made sense.

After dousing ourselves a final time with Kelly's bottle of Deet, we decided to leave the bottle in the stash for other bug victims who might find themselves in need. Pretty kind of Kelly to give that up.

We had fun despite the heat and I'm proud to report that the new geocachers bought a GPS upon their return to Louisville. They plan to try some European urban geocaching on their vacation.

I wonder how willing I'll be this spring and summer to run around in the woods off the trail with all the snakes and other critters, poking around under rocks and logs, looking for a geocache. Urban geocaching definitely sounds good.

Sidenote: to get to the cache, we had to cross the creek. Maggie actually got in the water up to her chest. We've never had her around water and it was interesting to see that she seemed OK with it. Maybe we'll take her swimming sometime this summer...