Zach, Samantha & Dina were out of town for the weekend, leaving Mac & me to hold down the fort. My brother Ben was in town visiting and I had told him about geocaching. He was interested in trying to find a cache, so we set off to visit the Beverly cache.
We had to be downtown in a few hours to babysit our niece Hannah, so we thought we would make a quick trip of finding this cache and head on back home. Ben wasn't really dressed for hiking - he had on a fancy pair of shoes. I assured him that this area wasn't filled with the tall prairie grass that completely soaked us on the last cache hunt, and that he would probably be fine. (In case you didn't pick up on the subtle way in which it was presented, the previous sentence employs the dramatic technique of foreshadowing... See Lessons Learned below)
This was located in a beautiful forest preserve and we headed down an obvious path in the direction the Garmin EMap indicated. If nothing else, this trip was already worth it as I had documented photographic evidence of Ben, the self proclaimed dog-o-phobe, being dragged through the woods behind Mac on his leash. As we were in a hurry to find the cache and then leave, we moved pretty quickly on our search. I want to bring Dina and the kids back to find this one too, and when we do, we'll walk more at a more leisurely pace.
Of course, it started raining when we were just about at the cache site. Fortunately, we ended up under a bunch of pine trees that kept us from getting completely drenched. Unfortunately, GPS reception isn't very good under heavy tree cover, so I had to keep going ut into the open to get a good positional fix, so I got soaked through. The EMap doesn't like to get wet.
We found the cache, wrote a brief note and headed back towards the car. Our final experiment - seeing how much water Ben's shoes could hold!.
Lessons Learned Today:
- Don't believe your brother when he tells you it's OK to wear your fancy shoes on a nice quick jaunt in the woods.
- Don't wear your fancy shoes on a nice quick jaunt in the woods.
- There's no such things as a nice quick jaunt in the woods.
- Those Garmin people are serious when they say the EMap isn't waterproof. Bring a ziploc bag for it always.
- Bring extra batteries. I had some this time, but it would have spoiled the hunt if I had fogotten them.
