For Davy’s birthday we gave him his first geocaching kit. Now you may be asking what is geocaching, it is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices (such as your iphone). Participants navigate to a specific set of GPS coordinates and then attempt to find the geocache (container) hidden at that location. There are almost 2 million hidden geocaches worldwide. They are everywhere and most people don’t even know it.
Immediately Davy was like let’s go find one, so Andy pulled up the map to see where the nearest one was, and don’t you know there are several near our home with the first being only .5 mile away. We had to go and see if it was there! Brandie, Laurence, Ryla, and Layne decided to join us on our adventure. Here is the provided clue to find the cache:
Just in time to commemorate the last Halloween you may ever spend on this earth! Are you brave enough for the most terrifying, dangerous cache you have ever encountered? Will you emerge from the experience alive? Or will your blood be a feast for the Dark One supped from a drinking gourd that was once your skull? (Note to parents: This is a safe, kid friendly cache. None of the above is true. Except for the part about your skull being used as a drinking gourd. That actually will happen.)
This cache was placed both to drop a cache in a big, tempting empty spot on the map and to commemorate having to get blood drawn here more times than I’d like. Originally it was going to be a micro, but I was inspired by the RainBowGirlz’ cool theme cache Creatures of the Night (GCT81E). There’s room for smaller and mid-sized trading items, and please try to keep your trades in line with the Halloween/horror theme of the cache. There’s a Dracula figurine for the FTF prize.
Additional Hints (Decrypt) – onfrbsgurovtgerr
Decryption Key
A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
————————-
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z
(letter above equals below, and vice versa)
It took Andy all of 3 seconds to say, “Oh, it’s over by the doctors office!”. Sure enough, the compass lead us there. The compass will bring you within 10 ft of the cache and then you are on your own to hunt it down. We wandered behind the doctor’s office and into the woods. The decrypt says, “base of the big tree”. It took us about 10 minutes to find it, Davy was so excited. The trinkets were small; Matty took a Halloween bookmark, Ryla took a small cow, and we replaced with a hairy spider. What surprised us was the signed log. There were two other families that we knew who had signed it before us. It is fun to think about all of the families that do this together. Can’t wait to see all of the fun places that we will adventure too…. www.geocaching.com
Davy reaching in to pull it out.
Today we decided to keep everything low-key. Davy is still recovering from the fever and we all need to get a little better before the big day tomorrow. We watched movies, baked gingerbread men, ate dinner with Dan and Debbie, drove around and looked at lights, threw carrots on the roof and sprinkled the lawn with sparkly oats, left out Santa’s cookies and milk, spent a little time Facetimeing the cousins, and then headed off to bed to read “The Night Before Christmas”. I can’t wait to see their faces tomorrow morning!
Mountains! Beach! or Both!... 