The+Ayerdis+Gang

Our adventure began October 13, 2013, on a dreary, gray, and cloud filled day. When it all began I was not in the mood to wander around looking for random hidden boxes, in my mind it was all a bit weird. I mean, who gets a bunch of random stuff, puts it in a box, and hides it somewhere in the spidery woods? Not this girl, no way, no how. I am NOT a geocacher, but alas I went geocaching anyways.

I downloaded a geocache app on my phone, once again thinking about how weird it was that sooo many people seemed to do this sort of thing. Were there really THAT many people go geocached that they needed to make an app for it?? The app found my location and showed me where the nearest geocaches were, and I was surprised to see that there were a lot more than I would have ever imagined. Off we went to Bass Lake Park.

When we arrived at the park, a lovely breeze started to pick up, which put me in a slightly better mood. Still though, I was grumpy because I had to go search for these caches when I really needed to be at home studying for a midterm. I clicked on the first cache on the app and off we were. About two miles later my phone alerted us and told us that we were getting close to our treasure.

I scrolled up on the cache information to look at the hints that the person who had hid it left for us. “You may have to jump a few puddles” it said. Well how interesting, as much as I would love to puddle jump in the woods where snakes live, I was not a happy camper. Luckily, I had my handy dandy husband with me and I, being the loving person that I am, sent him off to puddle jump with the snakes.

I kept a close eye on him to make sure he would survive the vicious woods, especially the spider webs. Phone in hand, Aaron jumped puddles and faced huge spider webs, and then he sees it. The cache!! He gets it out so I can see it and reads some of the journal entries inside the journal. It was pretty neat, can you believe it? Aaron thought it was pretty neat too.

One cache down, one to go, and down the trail we went. We were speed walking towards our next hidden treasure. 200 feet to go, and we see a nice pathway to where it wants us to go. Bravely we went ahead towards our target. Covered in tree bark, a small ammo can awaits us. It was pretty exciting to see it sitting there. It was really like discovering a buried treasure. When I opened it up there were several toys inside and another journal called “A Geocacher’s Dream.”

We found two caches so far and there was one more left in the park. Was I a geocacher? Was I in a better mood? Was I going to go into the woods again? Would we end up in a giant spider web? Shockingly, yes to everything, except for the webs we had a stick in front of us to ward of the spiders. Unfortunately after walking another mile and searching for the last cache, we could not find it. We were actually pretty disappointed about it, which again was shocking. We walked three miles back to the car and we became geocachers. Aaron’s brother even called us and Aaron told him that he should take his kids geocaching. We never thought we would actually recommend it to someone.

That is the tale of how Aaron and I accidentally enjoyed geocaching.

