we've been geocaching!

just a couple of weeks ago, sabin went geocaching for the first time with her friend andreas. we were thereby introduced to the whole idea of geocaching (addie, i heard you've been doing it for two years, you must tell us about it!). since then, i've downloaded the app for my iPhone so we can do it wherever we are and we've found three caches within walking distance of our house.

the first one, we really took the long way and ended up scratched and covered in thorns and weed seeds rather unnecessarily, but we found it!  sabin led the way:

here's a shot of the wrong way we went...it was quite treacherous:

but we did find it in the end, our very first cache as a family (sabin had found several together with her friend):

and here's what was inside. it was originally a crystal cache, with quartz stones to trade, but people had traded lots of other items into the box. we had taken a piece of quartz from the black hills with us to trade, taking the cache description very seriously.

then, a few days later, we went on another geocache walk and found this book cache up near the old farm where sabin used to go to pre-school.

we thought the idea of a book cache was really cool. we brought a book to put in and we took a book out as well. super fun!

and then yesterday, we took Else, our neighbor who is a sort of surrogate grandmother to sabin along on to find a cache.  it wasn't one where you trade, it was just a film case where you should log that you found it. it was a relatively new cache, as we were only the 5th ones to write in the log.

addie, i hope you'll share some of your geocaching experiences with us.  we're totally newbies. and the last one was difficult for us, because we didn't expect it to be magnetic and up high, we were looking on the ground. we hope we get smarter about it! and we want to make our own cache eventually too.