A Hot Day of Geocaching

It was really hot and muggy today. The sign at the bank said 86-degrees. But we ventured out to do a little local geocaching around town. We loaded up the GPS, the Geo-Monkey, our box of geocache swag and headed out.

First we ventured up to Sunset Park in Lakeland Hills. Dakota's baseball team has played here a few times so he likes this park. And he was the one to find the first cache- underneath the light pole.

Here's what the cache looked like. An Altoids tin painted black. Cache, Geo-Monkey and Brother-Monkey.
Here was the second cache at the park. This one was down a trail through the woods. It was so HOT in the sunshine! This one was a pretty cool container made out of a big PVC pipe.

Sydney spent the night with Marina last night so she went along with us. And Corrina Dirks joined us for the day too.
Trekking through the woods back to the van.

Two caches and Marina & Sydney were done. Too hot. So they were ready to head over to Sydney's house where they were planning to go swimming. Along the way though we made one more stop at Roegner Park for another cache. Turned out this one was a bit more of a hike than we were thinking. Only a 1/4 mile walk but the heat was just a bit miserable.

Corrina found this one in the big tree.

Here are the wilted hot girls.

Feeling better on this part of the trail... in the shade. Dakota suggested walking behind dad because "dad makes a LOT of shade!" Thanks a lot you little weasel!

After dropping the girls off at Sydney's house we continued on our geocaching adventure. Corrina found the next one too. This was a fairly easy one- just a black painted tin hidden in the bushes at Fulmer Park. We took a geobug from this one and left our little monkey treats.

Corrina and Dakota found another one in the branches of this tree next to where the old YMCA was. It is sad to go by there now and see just a scrubby field where our old YMCA building and fantastic summer camp used to be. I think back to all the amazing activities and fun we had on those grounds and it is weird just seeing an overgrown field. The only sign that the YMCA and summer camp were ever there is the berm that used to create an amphitheatre seating area in the campfire area where we used to have the big stage where I painted the giant Indian Thunderbird so many years ago. Sad that it is all gone now.

Next stop- Game Farm Park. This was our first "DNF" (did not find) of the day. The GPS took us right here to the corner of the tennis courts and the clues led us to believe the cache should be fairly simple to find but there was nothing to be found. Either we were going cuckoo from the heat or this one has been muggled.

Our last stop was a simple magnetic cache. We zeroed in on it quickly, found it under the picnic table, signed the log and left behind our tiny monkey trinket for the next to find it.

We were happy to be headed home to the air conditioned house for a nice big glass of cold water and some cold watermelon. Very refreshing after a HOT day of adventure.