Geocaching in the cold!

Day two without my computer and it is not as bad as I thought it would be as I have more time now to put pen to paper and write.

I forgot to ask yesterday if you have been walking. I have and today Jason, my hubby, and I went o find two geocaches that he figured out the Sudoku puzzles for. I had been working on these two puzzles for about four years and he turns around and does them in a day. They are not the puzzles with the numbers in them, them I can do, and these were odd shaped puzzles with letters in them!

They looked easy when I first started them but then when I made a mistake it screwed the whole puzzle up and I must have restarted the puzzle about seven or eight times before I finally gave up and put it in my desk cubby hole.

So, as I said we went to get these two geocaches that were about 10 kilometers away from our house. We drove to the parking area of the location and got out of the car and walked for about a kilometer in the deep snow with the cold wind cutting through us as we got closer to the location.

Did you notice how I said we were walking in the snow? I think that should add double the distance that anyone walks! Anyway, yes there was about a foot of snow on the ground and the wind was freezing and it was starting to snow…again!

You would have thought that would have given us a clue that if it is snowing and the ground is frozen, there might be a chance that the geocaches container is also frozen into its hidey hole.

Nope, we walk the kilometer there and find the tree stump where it is supposed to be located and find that the center of the tree is frozen and all of the debris inside it is frozen! Yes I can hear you saying “Well DUH!”

We didn’t think to bring our pick axe with us so we looked around to find a trusty stick. We find one and poke around in the stump to loosen the dirt/debris only to discover that the cache container was not in there. Someone that is not a geocacher (aka a muggle) found it and took it! So, now we are frozen, my hands are turning blue and hurt so much from the cold and the wind (I forgot my gloves in the car!) that I could barely hold onto the GPS. All I could think was ‘it is a good job that the GPS has a lanyard on it so I can hang it around my neck!‘

So now we trudge back through the snow to the car and I can’t get my car door open because my hands were so cold, so Jason opened it for me and I managed to get my gloves on and warm up while we head for the next geocache.

One more cache to try and find and we both look at the location and decide that we will wait until the ground thaws out a bit so we don’t have to go through what we did with the tree stump!

I am proud to say that on just that outing we walked nearly four and a half miles in total, and that includes walking back and forth trying to find the cache.
My days total for distance was five point nine miles!

I can walk for a long time if it involves finding a geocache and it really does take your mind of getting exercise and just makes it fun!

Well, I am still walking even though I am not in contact with you. I hope you are walking as well!

©2011 7Ladybugs

February 27, 2011