As I mentioned yesterday, I got a handheld GPS unit and was going to give GeoCaching a go. Well, today when I got home, Thomas and I headed out for our first “treasure hunt.” The cache we were after is actually in our subdivision, which made it a good first hunt since it was so close and I had a pretty good idea of where it was. Yes, this does somewhat violate the spirit of GeoCaching, but for a first go with a 4.5 year old, I wanted to make certain we found it.

And find it we did! We parked by the pool, got out, sprayed our arms and legs with Deep Woods Off! and started out. I let Thomas wear the GPS unit around his neck and showed him how to read the map display. I told him that the line showed us where we wanted to go and that the arrow was where we were, and it needed to point as closely as possible to the line. He got a real kick out of that. “Daddy, we need to go to the right. Oops! Too far!” It was fun. We had to trek through some weeds that were taller than he is, but we found the cache and opened up. There was a ton of stuff in it. Some toys, a big sea shell and some stuff I didn’t recognize. We looked at all of it, recorded our find in the log book, took a little green MatchBox type car and left a Disney trading pin of Goofy. We then closed it back up, walked around the lake a bit, then headed for home.

Thomas had a ball, and I rather enjoyed myself as well. He’s ready to go on another hunt, only next time he wants one that isn’t so close to home! That shouldn’t be a problem. According to GeoCaching.com, there are about 30 in the area.