Pirates in the Woods...X Marks the Spot!

Aiden opening the first cache he found

Given our tendency to try anything that gets the kids outside having fun in the woods, I'm surprised it took us this long to try geocaching.  I sort of got a little reminder at work last week, when I was out in the field with some co-workers and we found a geocache on a Forest Society property.  No biggie, the Forest Society allows geocaching, but when we peeked inside the bag of "trinkets" inside this ammo box, I thought...not for the first time...wow, Aiden would love this.  So this weekend, we finally tried it.

The guts of a geocache, in a ziploc inside an ammo can.

For those of you who are unfamiliar, geocaching is a sport where people hide boxes outside, filled with tiny trinkets and a log book, and then publish the GPS coordinates of their cache(s) online.  Others download these coordinates onto their own GPS units (or iphones, as in our case...yes, there's an app for that) and strike out into the woods to find the treasure.  The caches are different sizes, and often hidden in clever places (inside hollow trees, under rocks, etc) and often you have to decode a hint or small poem in order to solve the puzzle.  Once you find a cache, you sign and date the logbook and trade a small trinket if you want to.  

Haley with her toy horse (left), and one of the caches we found in a dead tree (right)

Armed with a bouncy ball, plastic ring and some silly bands - and Andy's iphone - we found 3 geocaches on a conservation property in New London.  It was fun...Aiden hiked a lot longer without complaining than he would have otherwise...and he got really excited each time we got very close to the cache location and had to actually hunt for it in the landscape.  Aiden traded his old loot for a little plastic ping-pong game, a tiny kaleidoscope, and some dice, and even Haley made a trade for a small plastic pony she clutched happily all the way home.  I'm going to go out on a limb and say this will become a frequent activity for us in the foreseeable future....Aiden loves it because he thinks we're treasure hunting... Andy and I love it because we all get out in the woods and get some exercise, and I (additionally) love it because now there's some grander purpose for all that gumball machine chotsky that Aiden saves in his room!