First Day of Spring!

Today was the first day of Spring. Where does the time go?!

Carol and I had a lovely morning. Marina babysat for Aaron & Dani overnight last night and Dakota stayed there too. So it was just the two of us this morning... doesn't happen very often! We got up to a beautiful sunny warm morning for the first day of Spring. We went out to breakfast together at the Sunbreak Cafe in downtown Auburn - our favorite local breakfast spot. It was relly nice to spend that little bit of time together!

After the kids came back home we headed out for an afternoon of Geo-Caching. Found a couple of fun caches. First stop was a tiny little park right here in Auburn that we had no idea was there. It is a little oasis set aside just for the birds and there is a neat tower you can climb up in to watch them. A family of swallows had a nest in one of the birdhouses; we watched the blue-backed daddy swallow swooping around catching bugs over the field while the mommy swallow poked her head out of the birdhouse now and then as if to keep an eye on him.

Our next stop was a tiny park at the top of the hill on the west side of Auburn. Just across the road from the Mountainview Cemetery and with a gorgeous view of Mt. Rainier the park is called "Mountainview Park". Makes sense. And the view is nice.
The kids are so strong... they can hold up the mountain. OK, daddy didn't get the angle of the camera quite right while squinting into the sun... so they're only holding up the top half of the mountain. Geo-Monkey met a new friend... Geo-Deer and got his picture taken with the cache. This cache must've been here for a while. It was made from a REALLY old round Altoids tin... I don't even remember Altoid tins being round!

We headed back down the hill and toward Federal Way. Stopped at the old Blue Heron Outlook Park at the base of Peasley Canyon and found this nice big ammo box cache. We stumbled around looking under all the wrong stumps until Dakota finally thought to climb down a little further and found it quickly. Should've been a quick & easy find but we stumbled around in the bushes longer than we should've. Silly us. Good thing we did this one in early Spring while the stinging nettles, which were abundant, were still nice and small!

Dakota makes the find!

Our last stop of the day was up at West Hylebos Park in Federal Way. We found a nice cache in this park a year or so ago and were pleased to see that there was another cache placed here to find. We love this park and it was a great place for a nice walk on the boardwalk on this gorgeous Spring day. Unfortunately we weren't at our best for caching today I guess. Should've been an easy cache from reading the other logs at www.geocaching.com but for some reason we came up empty handed on this one. But we weren't too disappointed because we had a really great walk through the park. We saw several bunnies, two snakes, a couple of duck families (no baby ducks yet though) and had a blast identifying different types of trees and plants.

It was a lovely, fun day with the family. Happy Spring, Everyone!