Muggles No More

We may have just found the perfect activity for our family. Or as close to it as you can get. Part treasure hunt, part gadget/technology play and a big serving of the great outdoors. We took the kids out geocaching with Brett's new GPS unit during the holiday break.

It was cold and there was snow on the ground, but we just bundled everybody up and headed outside anyway. Max was at a friend's house, so we took our almost-child Katie with us instead.


First stop was the old Chester Cemetery. (No grave digging . . . I promise.) This is an old rural cemetery with a lot of nature paths. We couldn't find this cache in spite of the fact that Katie, who had been there before, told us where it was. ('Katie! Katie, don't tell us unless we . . . . sigh, nevermind.')


Then we went to Terrace View Park where it took us a few minutes, but we were finally able to find the cache. Eureka! With that, we were no longer Muggles! Muggles is the term, lifted from J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories, that geocachers use to describe non-geocachers.

Old Eagle Eye was the first to spot this one.

Look how tiny it is! But, we found it.

It was getting dark but we decided to try for one more. Someone had placed one just outside the grounds of the Spokane Temple. Katie had also been to this one, so we were careful to remind her not to tell us where it was unless we asked her to.


As we pulled the van off the road, Katie pipes up "It's right there under the 'P' sign." Lesson learned: Only take Katie geocaching to places she hasn't been!


Sure enough, there it was: a little film canister shoved into the gap between the signpost and the sign. So, we signed the log and put everything back where it was, nice and safe.

We went out the next day to Sullivan Park, this time with Max and without Kate. We did lots of tromping around in the weeds, but found all the caches we were looking for there. My favorite part was finding something funny in one of the caches: the 'Tote and Chip' card of Kyle Leavenworth, a priest in our ward. When Max saw it, he got all serious and said "We'd better get it back to him or he can't carry a pocket knife." We assured Max that since Kyle will soon go away to college that he's probably allowed a pocket knife without having his 'Tote and Chip' on him. We ended up with a last cache at the waterfall at Mirabeau Park.

As we walked back to the car, a tired Elise asked 'Can we take a break from geocaching tomorrow?' I guess no activity is perfect! Maybe if we brought M&Ms?