Team Markwell's GPS Adventures
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July 2001

What do you do when your wife is desparately trying to study her college online, and you need to get the kids out of the house? What if one of them is 1½ years old? Best idea: pick a cache that requires about an hour drive, and a 10 minute walk. How about a cool theme cache? The answer: Floatch’s Lame-O CD cache. Just across the Indiana border on I-80, this made for about an hour's drive out. Once in the Portage area, I actually found the parking spot for the cache in about 10 minutes, and found the cache after about 5 minutes of walking from the car. Sam (the 1½-year-old) decided that this was actually pretty cool. The CD trade was "interesting" at best, but it was still a pretty fun cache. With this introduction to taking both boys on cache hunts, I'll be taking Sam more often, just not on the long walks. An hour's drive home insured that the wife got all of the necessary college stuff out of her system, and we came home pretty darn proud of ourselves.

Fourth of July - picnics, summertime and now "Geocaching." What a great alignment of all that is good to make for a great day! The temperatures were going to be a pleasant 80°-83°, bright sunshine, and the whole family had a day off in the middle of the week! We were going to make the day a 3 or 4 day cache, but decided against it after our experience at the Rock Cut Cache below, but nonetheless, we started off with Willow Creek. The coordinates for the parking were OK if you had a bike and wanted to travel the distance. We didn't - so we parked in the subdivision just south of the cache coordinates and hoofed it the 0.25 miles to the cache. Easy find and a great time with the whole family. Sam (the littlest one) was just starting to talk a whole lot more, and bent down early in the hunt pushing on a tree root and saying "wass dis?" We told him it was a root. Then, every five feet or so, he would stop, bend down and touch a root, saying "roo." Yes, Sam, that's a root. The frustration was a little too much for the older boy, so Drew and I forged ahead about 100 yards and got the cache. We took pics and had a great time. On to cache two for the day (or so we thought...).

With a great cache find already under our belts, we decided to try the other cache in the same park (since we already drove all the way to Rockford). We unloaded everyone and started down the trail toward the cache. About 1/3 of the way in, Sam (at 20 months) decided it was time to stop walking. We agreed that he was probably getting tired, so we called it a very premature day and decided on the McDonald's Playland just off the interstate for lunch. Good day, and our aborted trip was logged as a "note."

My family had heard just how much fun I was having with Geocaching, so my wife's brother Mike and his 6-year-old daughter Mikayla decided they wanted to tag along on a Geocache. I had been planning on a hike to the Atomic Age Cache for a while, so it seemed perfect: a 1/1 cache on a beautiful day. The cache hike was a little longer than I expected, and I'm glad we brought drinking water. We got to the area, read the historical stone (very neat) and proceeded into the brush to find the cache. My GPS indicated that the cache was about 60-70 feet away, but I said to Mike and Mikayla, "What we're looking for is a good solid hiding spot. Kinda like that fallen log over there. If I were going to hide a cache, that's where I'd put it." To which Mikayla responded, "Like this?" It was indeed under the fallen log I had pointed out. This was my first encounter with "The Force" mentioned so highly on the bulletin boards. We all had a good laugh and trading trinkets. We noticed Bryan's trademark Altoids in the cache, but did nothing about them. The next cacher who found the cache said it had been mauled by a critter, apparently with a soar throat. New lesson for this cache: Take all food from the cache and throw it out!

Back in April and May, I had been finding caches hidden by Bryan and noticed that he had an AOL address. After chatting with him online for quite a while, I toyed with the idea of meeting a few of these other cachers. Bryan and I set a date, and low and behold - we had the first annual Geocaching Picnic for the Chicago area. Almost everyone was there that we could think of, except Jon Cunningham, who desparately wanted to attend, but couldn't because of work. The picnic shaped out to be a fabulous event, with other event caches around the country being modeled after it. Prior to the event, Bryan and I had been having discussions with the DuPage County Forest Preserve District about Geocaching in the DFP Forest Preserves. The news was not good, but the picnic allowed us a mechanism to air our grievances - even if it was only with each other. Bryan donated McDonald's gift certificates, and I made stickers for 7 separate caches that Bryan and I hid in different areas of the park. These were temporary caches, so as not to conflict with the DuPage FPD's guidelines. We all ate and swapped stories, and then broke out into groups to go search for the caches. Since Bryan and I hid on separate parts of the park, we each had caches that we could go seek. Our group mistakenly decided to hoof it to the area, and we were dog tired when we finished. Drew made a great friend with Mac the Geocaching Wonderdog. Great day for all, even though I haven't heard from Bryan since the picnic.

The Group Shot
David April's Picnic Photos (really good)

We're Nuts. Plain and simple. Going to Tennesseee with the kids? Why not drive all night long? We can even hit a night-time Geocache at a rest stop on the way down! NOT! We tried this cache at 11:30 at night while Sammy slept in the car and Sherry kept the car running. Unfortunately, we didn't find the cache - but no love loss on this one. New lesson from this cache: Kelly doesn't like night-time Geocaching.

My first Geocache with my mother-in-law. Good thing I had just bought serious hiking boots! From where we started, we went about a mile down trail and ended up at Rainbow Falls. Gorgeous scenary - including a little overlook that had a cliff overlooking the Tennessee River Gorge, with NO guard rail or any safety measures. EEK! At that point we turned right and followed the gorge toward Rainbow Falls and the Swinging Bridge. Once there, Kay and I crossed over the bridge to the far side and started up the trail, but it became evident that we were still quite a ways a way from the cache. Already being out on the trail for 2 hours, we decided to call it quits for the day, to return later - next time with Drew now that we knew where we were heading.

I had these grandiose dreams of placing this in the back woods of where Drew and I had hiked in early April of 2000, but we got about a tenth of a mile in and we decided to give up just because of the ticks! EEEK! The Ticks in Tennessee are on Steroids! We had coated ourselves with really heavy deep woods stuff, and they seemed to think that was a condiment! However, the cache - fully stocked and in a very unique container, was placed. Everyone seems to like it, too!

My father-in-law wanted to try Geocaching as well, but he had just had knee surgery, so we tried to find one of the simplest and shortest caches available. Unfortunately, it wasn't the short walk we thought, and he was hurting quite a bit by the time we were finished. The cache was good, although the weather was extremely humid (my glasses kept fogging up). The only really bad part about hte cache hunt was once we got off the interstate. We tried to find the road to get us to the town we needed, but the locals were extremely clueless! We did stop by the overlook on the way out for a misty look at the area.

A much better outing for this hike! Starting at Rainbow falls took a good 3/4 of a mile off the hike - and it was still very long. Drew was a trooper, with fogged glasses and a long hike. I'm very glad we had water and snacks. I even ate one of those yucky granola bars! Kay (Sherry's Mom) was so worried about Drew and me hiking the Cumberland Trail that she said that she would be coming out after us if we weren't back by a certain time. We found the cache after little difficulty and traded a Morgan Dollar from the cache, and started the hike on the way back. There was a large flat rock just on the far side of the swinging bridge that Drew and I had scaled with no problem on the way out. On the way back, I told Drew to sit down on the rock and slide like a playground slide. I should have copied him, because I landed swaure on my butt, with the GPS flying out of my hands. I had also tried to brace myself with my left wrist, which I duly sprained. I had Drew grab the GPS before it went anywhere, and we hobbled back to the car - tired, sore, but TRIUMPHANT! We had tackled this cache!

A nice diversion in Nashville about lunchtime on the way home. We needed to get out and stretch and Sherry was tolerant of this cache. We also were in no rush, as Paducah (our stopping spot) was only 4½ hours away from Chattanooga. Sherry was thrilled to be able to open the container and trade everything out. I even let her log the find on the site when we got back home.

All right! Sherry feels confident enough to find a cache by herself. I've technically been to the cache site (I talked with Bryan and he said I was right on top of it), so I know where it is. Here's the GPS honey, just follow it with Drew and I'll stay with Sam. You guys should be able to find the box with no problem. Never again will I speak those words, if I wish to live. The long sloping hill down that I had found in April was a lot steeper than it looked, and once Sherry got down there, the Yellow Jackets and Mosquitos decided it was lunch time as well. They got within 250 feet of the cache, but couldn't continue because of the insects. On top of that, the climb back up that steep slope almost did my wife in. I said I would try and coated myself in Deet. Apparently, that just made the insects mad. I eventually got to the same spot they did, and could see the fallen tree at base of the gully. After taking my short bearing legs through a thicket of stinging nettles (now I know what they are!) I got to the base of the tree, only to be swarmed by Yellow Jackets dive-bombing me. That's it - no cache is worth this. I'll tackle this one in March or April of 2002.

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Last Updated: Thursday, February 21, 2002 15:00 CST