It+Began+With+One

__**Rachel Ervin**__ media type="file" key="try again.flv" width="429" height="429" One day I was assigned a geocaching project in my social studies class. At first I thought my teacher was crazy; there was no way that running around, looking for items that other people have hidden could really be that interesting. So I started my indifferent adventure of geocaching with a fairly bad attitude. I started by looking for a fairly close location. I figured there would not be any caches nearby, so I was prepared to drive a few miles because who in the world would hide something in little Buies Creek, North Carolina. I was surprised at my findings! There was a cache about 100 yards away from my apartment. So I looked for caches near different locations that I visit every week. There were caches at my grocery store, near my church, and even on my running route. I passed them every day and had no clue. I was officially interested. I was excited! I went and signed out my GPS and grabbed my husband, Michael, and set out for an adventure!

It was a Wednesday night, so we were actually on our way to church; so we decided to find the geocache that we passed every Sunday. Its name was “Sign of the Lion,” pretty creative name. Our hint was, “it combines history and caching.” So we were perplexed from the beginning of our journey because we had never seen anything involving history on our way to church for the last few years. Our Coordinates were N 35° 17.544 W 078° 35.760, which brought us to the Food Lion that we normally stopped and got our groceries on the way home from church.

There was a sign that was part of a historic trail from confederate days. From the information that I gathered from the sign, after Union General William T. Sherman marched in Georgia, he began marching north toward General Grant. Evidently, at this spot Sherman’s left wing passed through on March 17. I had heard of Sherman’s march in Georgia, but I did not remember learning about him marching through North Carolina. I had no idea this sign existed!

After I finished reading the sign, I figured the cache must be somewhere close by because the hint was that this cache was combined with history. I searched all over the sign, even checked to see if I could lift the plastic part of the sign, but there was no cache to be found.

I failed to see the road sign that marked the historic spot that was located right behind the informational sign. I checked the road sign and found a small magnetic capsule clinging to the inside of the sign.

I snatched the capsule, opened it up, and found a little piece of paper with names and dates written on it. I FOUND MY FIRST GEOCAHCE!!!!!!!! My husband and I were amazed!

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I quickly did a victory dance/jump and wrote my name on the paper along with the other geocachers who had succeeded and found this neat spot.

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As I placed the magnetic capsule back in its place in the sign a HUGE spider crawled out of the sign that I just had my hand in! I screamed like a little girl and had to take a quick second to figure out how I was going to put the cache back without having a critter craw on me or worse…BITE me! Of course the day before I taught a lesson on how a spider’s bite is no worse in pain than a bee sting…. I failed to remember that information when the spider was so close to snacking on my finger. media type="file" key="the end.flv" width="510" height="420" So I gathered my courage and flicked the capsule onto the inside of the sign. No spider and the capsule was back where it belonged, it was a good day!

I AM HOOKED, but I’m not alone! I went to the beach and camped with my family this weekend. Most people would want to spend most of their time on the beach or around a warm fire, but I introduced geocaching to my family. We found the one and only cache located within the campground! It was much more difficult than my first cache, but this one was more fun. We looked for the cache on the beach for over forty-five minutes, just to find that we had been stepping on it the entire time! We had so much fun. Now, my family is officially hooked on geocaching; we are going on the parkway when I go home for fall break!



Twenty-First Century Explorers! Could you be Columbus? Check out this lesson plan!