Patrick Says

So, my wife attended a women’s something or other conference and I had the older boy Friday and Saturday. Wanting very much to get him (and me) out of the house, we went geocaching. What is that? The short version is that it’s hide and seek with a GPS. Go to www.geocaching.com for full details.

So, we go to the first one on Friday morning. I pack a bag, some extra batteries for the GPS, fruit snacks for the boy, et cetera. We get there and it’s a half-mile to the first of two. The boy collects rocks from pretty much anywhere outdoorsy that he goes. He finds two he likes at the start of the trail and we’re off. We walk into the woods and every two minutes a hear rustling. I stop him and we stand quietly. Nothing. Start moving and the noise is back. This goes on the entire time.

Now, there are some hills on these trails and holding a rock in each hand makes for a stumbling, bumbling boy. So I opt to break him off a stick to walk with instead. I did not realize that instinctively, a 2-year-old will attempt to hit everything he can when given a stick. That includes both of dad’s knees, dad’s stomach and the boy himself. But we persevere to within 50 feet of the first one. I didn’t realize these caches are usually hidden 50 feet off the path.

So I figure we’ll go to the further one which is 1.5 miles down the trail in the hopes I can get closer than 50 feet. We walk, I get hit three more times and the closest I can get is 150 feet to that one. I figure the boy doesn’t have that much in him, so we return to the 50 feet of the previous cache and hack our way in. And we found it! It was pretty cool. I left my extra batteries because the boy wanted the red clip in the cache (it’s a one in, one out thing on caches). We put the cache back and head home.

The next day I line us up an easy cache…or so I think. I get lost twice on the way there. We find the general area and we’re walking around a big parking lot. It looks like the cache is in the corner of the lot. But to my horror, I can’t find the cache. What I find is (and by no means is this list complete): broken beer bottles, a Pepsi bottle with a urine-colored liquid in it, a porn magazine, excrement of either a human or a dog (hard to tell from the size…yes, it was that gross) and tons of trash. We touched nothing and left disappointed. However, there aren’t a lot of things in the world that an Icee can’t fix. There’s always next weekend.

Seemed like a good time for a facelift. A couple friends recently changed their templates and I thought, why not? This one seems nice. We’ll see how it goes. Thanks for coming by.