Geocaching with the fam

Yesterday, L and I took my mom and my brother geocaching with us.  L and I love to go geocaching; the big draw for L is finding caches with "treasure" to trade. We have found all of the caches in the area that are big enough to have fun treasures to trade, so we decided to branch out into the next county, and it seemed like a fun day to invite some company along.  We picked up Nana and Uncle Scott at 9 a.m., printed out the cache info, and headed out for our adjoining county.  Typically, I write the coordinates for our cache goal on a notecard along with any clues that I've read in the notes on that cache's website, but the 2 caches that we were going after were both a little atypical.  They were both part of the Santa Fe trail - historical markers and landmarks - so I wanted the background information to take along.  You know, my teacher side doesn't turn off in the summer, so this was like a little history lesson just sitting there, waiting for me to pluck it!
Anyhow, once we were near the first location, we pulled over on a side road and had a little lesson on using a handheld GPS - how the numbers get smaller/larger depending on your movement, how to decide where to travel based on the numbers, etc.  My mom was surprisingly good at this - I hadn't been sure how comfortable she would be with this new technology tool, but she was a great navigator!

We drove to the first location - a one-room schoolhouse, made from stone that was originally part of a trading post created by some of the first settlers to create the Santa Fe trail.  We found the cache, traded a box of Jolly Ranchers and some magnet bookmarks for a Sonic coupon and FAKE NAILS.  This was, apparently, similar to the Holy Grail if you are a 9-year-old whose mother doesn't really condone fake nails.  Ahh, mom can't really say "no" since we aren't paying for them - they are a prize!  (What she doesn't know is that they take special glue or something, which we don't have!)  

The pictures above show our little geocaching group - Uncle Scott, L and Nana in the top picture, L with me in the middle picture in front of the stone schoolhouse, and some random cacti that we found growing in the prairie grasses.

Our 2nd cache was a multi-stage cache - three caches that "connect" to each other. You go to the first cache, and use some numbers found there to lead you to the next one, etc.  We found the first 2, which were signs, and we knew that the last one was the Marker Cottonwood.  It is a 200 year old cottonwood tree that was spared on the prairie, although trees were scarce and important, because it was the northern marker of the Santa Fe trail.  However, we couldn't find the darn thing!  You'd think something like that would be visible - and we even had been GIVEN the correct coordinates - but by golly, it just wasn't our day, apparently.  That was a pretty big disappointment...so we drove through Hutchinson on the way home and stopped for milkshakes.  You know, in the "sugar makes everything better" school of thought.