Norbert The Duck

I really didn’t want to get out of bed this morning but I knew I had to otherwise nothing would get done and I would miss two deadlines for articles.

I got up, got dressed and had my corn flakes with soymilk and my daughter walks in to my office all chipper and asks what we are doing today!

“Nothing if I have my way!” I told her!

“Come on mom we should go and grab that geocache by Norbert the Duck! Please mom!”

“Fine! Fine! Fine! Just let me finish up here and then we will go!”

What you should know is that Manda has always loved ducks! When she was younger she proudly announced in school that when she grew up she wanted to be a duck! Yes, I got called into the school because “your daughter is disconnected from reality!” She was in kindergarten! Whatever happened to use your imagination?

Anyway, we went to find the cache that was at the big duck.

Manda standing next to Norbert!

Somewhere on this HUGE duck is a geocache! Finding this part of the geocache is important because it has the coordinates to the final geocache.

Without revealing where it was or what it was, I will tell you that we got the information we needed to move on to the next stage. The next stage was going to be a bit more challenging for me as my car does not really go on Forest Service Roads.

A quick trip home to get the coordinates from the secret web page and when I Googled it, I knew exactly where it was, or should have been!

We went on the Forest Service Road but not really as it was still paved part of the way… I know technicality but still I didn’t go on a normal FSR!

Anyway, Manda and I jump out of the car with GPS in hand and head right for the logical place, the big tree stump. Nope it is not there and as we are under power lines and tree coverage the satellite signal was making the GPS bounce around. It would show that we needed to be twelve meters one way and then that we were two meters from it.

We set the GPS down on a stump with the antenna pointing to the sky to get a lock on some satellites. Yes! That worked great and we finally got the GPS settled down and we searched the whole area around this one stump.

Now we decide to expand our search radius and cover a wider area and still nothing.
There are only so many hiding places for a 50cal Ammo can to hide!

Manda looking for the geocache.

We decided that after an hour we would go home and contact the cache owner to see if it had been muggled (aka stolen). She is on line, which is perfect because she confirmed with me that I was in the right area, and the places we checked should have turned up the ammo can.

It's in there somewhere... or was!

I took my son back with me to double check before I posted to the web page that I did not find it (or better known as DNF) so that other people will know it may not be there.

I let him loose with my GPS and he checked the very same stump we had checked and all around the area and still came up with nothing!

This caching adventure didn’t turn up a geocache but it did get me walking for a total of five miles today.

I will check again on the cache once the cache owner has replaced the missing container.

What did you do today? Did you get your walks in?

©2011 7Ladybugs
March 11th, 2011