Goofy+Groovy+Narrative 

media type="file" key="IMG-7309.mp4" width="220" height="240" Woo Hoo for Geocaching!! Once upon a time, there was a college professor named Dr. Roukema whose main focus and principle was to consistently engage and involve students in active learning. It was about November time when she assigned a geocaching project. Now, I had never heard of geocaching ever before, but I was eager to learn. So, as I sat there listening to her explain what geocaching was and what our actual assignment entailed. I started to become quite overwhelmed. Not only was I concerned about the actual work (lesson plan, personal narrative, and wiki site), but I was also very concerned about actually being able to locate the geocache. Once Dr. Roukema said that it was more about the experience than actually finding the geocache, I was relieved.

So, since I was a little intimated and nervous about going to look for the geocaches, I of course decided to make my boyfriend, Gideon, come with me. I was expecting him to ask me a million questions about what this project was and what we were doing, but come to find out, his mom geocaches all the time and he actually knew a little bit more about the whole process than I did…. You learn something new every day right? When we went to go search for our first geocache, I prayed we didn’t see a lot of people we knew so I would not have to explain the whole long story of what we were doing again… and of course, we saw about half of the men’s soccer team leaving the student fitness center. So, I tried my best to explain what we were doing. Believe it or not, a few of them actually said that their parents did it too… I couldn’t believe it. I guess geocaching was more popular than I realized. So as we went to go look for the first geocache, the camel cache. We eventually made our way to the farthest bench (closest to the gas station) in the front of the convocation center. We looked all over/under/around it and couldn’t find anything! We started to walk back to the library but I was so convinced it was there, that we turned back around to look for it again. This time, I was laying on the ground looking for it, feeling the bench for anything I might have missed with my eyes, and yes I felt like quite a fool while lying on the ground and rubbing a bench in the middle of campus. Again, we came up empty handed. I felt so defeated and pathetic for not being able to find this tiny little hidden geocache. Gideon and I were way more into this search and competitive about finding it than I ever would have imagined.

After going back home empty handed, we decided to try to find a different one tomorrow. The next day, before heading to Lillington to look for the geocache that was located by the town hall, we stopped to look for the camel cache just 1 more time. After again, laying on the ground and feeling all over, around, and under the bench, we finally found the geocache. We were so excited! We opened the cache and took a peek at the log. As I was writing my name and date, Gideon said “Wait, I hope you’re writing my name too since I was with you every time we went to look for this cache.” I guess he had a point, so I let him sign his name too. As we were leaving the camel cache I started to talk to Gideon about how I wanted to find a cache in Roanoke, Virginia this coming weekend when I was visiting my sister.