Red Bridge Wonder and High & Dry
You know, it just didn't feel like geocaching today.
It was a beautiful day, sunny and warm, not a cloud in the sky. When you go looking for a cache in Chicago, rain and mud are supposed to be involved! So this was a new experience - I could get used to it.
To day we did a double header - Red Bridge Wonder and High & Dry. We went with another family, the Rudnick's, who were new to geocaching and excited to play. John and Sally, and their sons, Cameron and Corey haven't lived in Chicago very long so they looked to this as an opportunity to explore some nice area forest preserves.
Red Bridge was a very nice cache. We approached from the south, parking in the wrong place as we later saw an obvious and more appropriate parking lot. This did, however, make us pass right by the aviary that is maintained at the location. The kids enjoyed seeing the owl and turkey vulture. There were some cages for hawks and other birds as well, although they were empty.
We lined up the N-S coordinates of the cache location, and started heading heading due west through some tall prairie grass. We emerged after a few hundred feet onto an obvious path. (See Lessons Learned below). We followed this path around a bit. A small creek on our right prevented us from continuing west towards the cache location. We doubled back after a while and went north a bit further until we found a bridge over the creek. We made our way to the cache location. John and I both have Garmin EMaps and the devices pointed us over another bridge, by a tree that had an obvious cache hiding location look about it. Despite about 10 minutes of looking around, we couldn't find the cache. At one point, though, I looked at a tree on the other side of the creek and noticed a bit of plastic container. There it was!
The kids took a pen and a plastic bone thing. Zach left a Hot Wheels car and Samantha left a pencil. The logbook was soaked, so we didn't make an entry.
The second cache, High & Dry was just a few miles away. We stopped for a beverage break and gave Mac some water. This was another pretty area, although very swampy and marshy. I wasn't looking forward to going off trail here as it would have been quite a mess and having Mac covered in swamp mud on top of his already gamey Golden Retriever smell was a bit over the top for me. Fortunately we didn't have to. High & Dry is well named. We'll leave it at that! We found the cache relatively easily. We left a toy airplane, a top and a plastic spider. Corey and Cameron left a few other small things. I don't remember what the kids took. As we were filling out the log, a woman who was walking by, said "Hey are you guys doing that GPS treasure hunting thing?". She regulary walks on the trails for excersize and had met another geocacher last week who explained the game to her. She seemed pretty interested in the concept. Score another one for geocaching awareness!
We signed the log and high tailed it out of there before too many more of the dog sized mosquitoes chewed us alive.
Lessons Learned Today:
- When you get close, you don't have to make a beeline for the coordinates. Find the obvious path or trail and save yourself from cuts, scratches and ticks.
- If you take the time to bring your camera, don't leave it in the car.
- Bug spray, bug spray, bug spray!
