Hunting for Treasure

For Father's Day, we got Glayde a gps unit. You may remember that I have a TomTom GPS for my car... or you may just be in too much shock that I'm posting to my blog to remember that detail. I thought I Garmin eTrex Vista was a nice toy for hiking with the family. Hopefully we'll be able to plot our favorite paths and see exactly how far we went and how high we climbed. Heck we can mark the exact spot where Heath announces that he wants to go home during our hike. I'm not sure if all this information will be inspiring or depressing but hopefully it will add to the fun of hiking as a family.

Glayde's on a business trip but I decided to try out his GPS without him. :) No I didn't attempt a hike with two kids in tow. Instead we went hunting for treasure... well geocaching any way. I sold it to the boys as looking for treasure because in fact most caches do contain some small trinkets for trade. So with GPS and tradeable trinket in hand we hit a local park to look for our very first cache.

I was convinced that this adventure was going to end in disaster. You see as soon as we started wander the park trying to get an idea of which direction to look for the cache in, Heath took off running down a path and crashed and burned. He majorly scraped up one knee. After some crying (his) and some pleading (mine), we were off really hunting our treasure. When we found the tree I thought must be sheltering our treasure, the boys began climbing all over its gnarlly roots. With just one quick circuit of the tree, Grant was convinced that we weren't going to find it. He was probably looking for an honestly to goodness treasure box like the one they had in his kindergarten class or maybe the mini version he decorated for me on Mother's Day. I am the finder of lost things in our house as long was those things don't belong to me. I've found papers in minutes that Glayde has spent hours looking for. I'm always called upon to find lost toys and misplaced library books. The uterus must really have magical powers for locating things. This treasure was could not escape me either. Once I spotted it's hiding spot amid the tree roots, I let Grant do the really rewarding work of pulling out the box. And there along with a little logbook, a magnet and a wood disk was our treasure... a Hot Wheels space craft. In went our tropical fish stamper and the cache returned to its hiding spot.

Grant and Heath loved the treasure. I can't help but think it really resembles dozens of other toys that I want out of my house. At least we're now swapping our crappy trinkets for other peoples unwanted junk.