Yesterday was a long but fun day. Cub Scout Extravaganza - a day for new Cub Scouts to explore Cub Camp at Gerber. One of the fun things they could do was explore camp by finding geocaches at each camp area. That was my responsibility. Set up 11 caches - next year though we will hide less caches so that more kids can enjoy the fun.
10 p.m. on Friday night. We had returned from the Eagle Court of Honor and I expected that my MiGO contact would have dropped off the GPSrs. Nope. So I'd taken a shower and had just gotten out when he called, he was at my front yard cache and wanted to make sure he had the right house. So a big sigh of relief and thankful - and he brought me 10 GPSrs, not just 5 as I'd expected. Great - but now I had 11 sets of coordinates to enter into EACH one of those...got half of them done before I went to bed. Got up at 5:30 a.m., got ready to go, then waited for my friend to come who was going to help. Well, she didn't arrive until almost 6:30 so I had time to get two more GPSrs ready with coords. 3 to go.
We took the 1.5 hour trip up to camp, stopped for breakfast at Arby's drive thru, then had about an hour and a half to get the caches hidden in the places I'd already marked. About a mile and a half of walking. I left my friend at the starting place for the caching in cub camp, and went back to the boy scout pavilion where registration was taking place. After the opening, led scouts over to Cub Camp. They could go fishing, geocaching, crafts, ball fight on the pirate ship, or just explore camp on their own. We ended up with about 20 kids and their parents who wanted to geocache. Plus there were a few small groups that just took the coords as they knew how to geocache and had their own GPSr.
My group consisted of about 10 boys, their adult partners, and two 12 year old Boy Scouts who knew how to geocache and were there helping us. We had five GPSrs so the boys only had to share with one other. They had a lot of fun finding the caches, there were some who were getting frustrated that they weren't making the find so I'd occasionally slip the parent a hint to steer their child in the right direction more quickly. The group finished in about an hour and a half then we went to lunch. After lunch, went back to Babe where our Geocaching HQ was and waited around. The second group reported back soon thereafter and we stayed there for a while. Finally, with about 45 minutes to go, I had just sent our three Boy Scout helpers out to pick up the caches when a group came in and wanted to go caching. By that time there wasn't time for a full tour anyway, so I took them down to the waterfront cache that we'd planned to pick up on the way back. These boys had a blast just finding one cache. Collected the GPSrs - 9 of them get kind of heavy around your neck! (Had 8 plus my own.) We closed down Babe and went back to the registration area where we drew names for five of the Get in the Game geocoins. I was able to connect with three of the winners while still there, so still have to get ahold of the other two winners.
On to home we went. You can tell I'm tired out when I don't even feel like stopping for a cache on the way home. And there's a new series out with a pathtag reward for finishing. Oh well.
Looking forward to a busy week, then on Friday we leave for Wawa Ontario with the Gold Wing group (on the motorcycle) and then the plans are to complete the circle tour of Lake Superior. This will be our third completed circle tour of the Great Lakes.
I'm hoping and praying that it will be a good time spent together. Things have been rocky lately as regular readers well know, and perhaps it will be a time of renewal for us both. Time will tell.
Oh, and I've been promised that I can stop for at least 10 geocaches. One in Minnesota since I don't have any in that state yet; and one each in the 9 upper peninsula of Michigan counties which I don't have any cache finds in. If I'm successful, I will have completed the 83 county Michigan Challenge. Not a big deal to non-cachers but it is to me. I of course have many other caches loaded up in my GPSrs and if we happen to stop in a place that has a cache, I'll be prepared....
Hope to have wifi access along the way so I can post blog updates.
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