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The Great Geocaching Adventure of the Lone Ranger Megan Towell

I woke up early on October 19 anticipating going geocaching. I had never been geocaching before, but it sounded interesting. The problem was I usually like being the Lone Ranger, but running around hunting for hidden caches all by myself didn't sound like much fun. I first tried to negotiate my dog, Harley, to see if he would go out to the park hunting for caches with me. Unfortunately, Harley isn't exactly a morning person and he refused to leave the comfort of his favorite chair. Determined not to give up, I drove over to my boyfriends apartment in Apex. Normally, he isn't much of a morning person either, but he had heard me talking about my geocaching assignment and thought it might be cool to go out exploring. While he was getting dressed, I starting playing with the Geocaching App I had downloaded on my phone. I searched for nearby caches and was shocked to see that there were several caches nearby. One was less that 0.2 miles away. From the clues, we determined it was probably near the sub shop across the street. Intrigued we decided to walk across the street to see what we could find.

We searched the parking lot for about thirty minutes trying to find the elusive cache. Try as we might, we could not find it and, eventually, we gave up. With rumbling bellies, we grabbed a sub and plotted our next move. After some debate, we decided a park might be a good place to search for caches. We decided we would go to the local town park.

There are nine caches hidden around the lake and a couple others up near the ball fields. It was a beautiful day so we decided to walk around the lake and see what we could find.

After a brief walk around the lake, we came to a trail through the woods where the first cache was supposably located.The cache was descried as being very small and called "Cat Yak". We decided we were looking for a cat. We looked and looked. The locator app would take us in one direction and then take us in a slightly different direction. I was beginning to get frustrated when something caught my eye. There it was! A tiny cat dangling from a small branch. Excited, we added our names to the log and kept going.

We came back to the main path were our next cashe was hidden. It was described as being near the water, close to the path, and camoflaged. This cache proved to be the trickiest to find because it was indeed camoflaged. After a few minutes of searching, my boyfriend's keen eyes spotted the cashe near a fallen tree off in the woods. In side the jar we found a couple little trinkets people, children most likely, had left behind and a log.

We continued our journey around the lake. This time our mission was to find another cat! They are hidden everywhere out in the park. This cat was harder to spot that the first one and the GPS was not cooperating very well in the woods, but we successfully found it! Can you spot it in the picture below?



After walking almost three miles, we decided to call it a day, but we had so much! We can't wait to go geocaching again and,with all the parks around Wake County, who knows what we might find!



Geocaching would be a great activity to get students engaged in a lesson, while allowing them to go outside and have a little fun. Check out my geocaching lesson plan below: