As a Mother's Day Fun Activity, Mom and I ventured out this afternoon on our first every GeoCaching expedition.
It was a total hoot. We purposefully selected a, supposedly, very easy cache: Earthquake!!!! However, we managed to make it quite a bit more difficult.
Note to self: Prior to the next geocaching expedition, make some sort of effort to understand the conventions behind longitude and latitude coordinates. It would have been somewhat easier to do our homework in the comfort of the living room instead of standing out in the middle of the toolies peering at one's GPS trying to figure out if the latitude and longitude coordinates decreases or increases depending upon which direction one moves.
But after much trial and error, we made the startling discovery that latitude increase as one moves north and longitude increases as one moves west. Total Duh!
Anyhoo, after much stumbling around through devil's club and giant earthquake manufactured tussocks, we managed to arrive at ground zero: N 61° 11.927 W 149° 58.781. Ground zero is about 50 feet south of the Inlet and about 20 feet south of a big pile of bear shit. Fortunately the bear doo was left over from last year.
Well, our GPS said we were right at ground zero, but I couldn't find the cache. I looked under leaves, sticks, etc. Mom was perched 15 feet above me on a big steep tussock. I looked in the trees. I looked everywhere. Finally, after about 10 minutes of stumbling about, I looked again under the huge root ball of a fallen tree - and there was our little rectangular duct tape wrapped geocache. Eureka!
So the next step was to get Mom down to the cache. As you can see from the picture below, Mom was quite high up on a nasty slick tussock. I suggested that Mom just sit and scoot her way down. Mom informed me that scooting was not an option - she did not want to get her coat dirty.
I can see the headline now, "Mother falls to death on Mother's Day while Geocaching because she did not want to get her coat dirty."
But Mom worked her way down. We then opened the geocache and what a hoard of goodies. The geocaching tradition is take one item and an item behind. So I took a bowling pass ID card and left a hopping eyeball. We had a great time. Although, in about ten days, this site is going to be overridden with mosquitos and devils club. But now, it's perfect!
Here's Mom with our first ever geocache (and an unsullied coat)!!!!!
8:44:04 PM 
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