My first time geocaching

Earlier this week, Mrs. Santa and I decided to have a day to ourselves. So we set up plans and started Saturday morning with the glorious task of mowing the lawn. Once that was done we hopped into our mini-van and headed for Frankenmuth Michigan. We had planned a day of geocaching, shopping and a nice dinner. For those that may not know, geocaching is using a GPS receiver to locate caches. They may be an actual cache like an old ammo can containing a logbook and trinkets or a virtual cache where you go and observe something and then log it on line. I have a Tom tom bluetooth GPS. This is a receiver only and talks to my Nokia internet tablet. I use Maemo Mapper to display maps controlled by the Tom tom. We used this to get close, to navigate the roads. I also have a Garmin ForeTrex 101 which we would use walking to actually locate the cache.

We drove into Frankenmuth from the south end. We stopped at Bronner's for our first cache. Now Mrs. Claus and I had been talking about geocaching for a couple of years ever since we had read and article in the newspaper about it. So we were both pretty excited. I had selected some likely caches from http://www.geocaching.com/ and printed them out on paper. I had set waypoints in my GPS's and we were ready. We went to the first one and found it in about five minutes. We took pictures of the event and then did some shopping at Bronner's. Bronner's is the largest Christmas store in the world. After the first cache and shopping it was late afternoon so we stopped for a great meal of schnitzel, wurst, saur bratten, roast pork loin and fried chicken with all of the fixings at the Bavarian Inn. Having spent three years in Germany in the 70's we always look forward to the great German food there. After that we went to four more caches. Two were regular caches, one was a virtual cache at the Veteran's Memorial. The last one was late in the day. It was a small cache. So small it said in the description to bring your own pen for the log book as there was no room in the cache for one. Also, according to the description, was very hard to find. Well I'll agree to that. We could not find that one before the light began to fail. But along the way to the others we stopped in the Cheese Haus and bought some great smoked gouda. Finally we headed for home.

Our treasures for the day, a nativity scene eraser, a single red plastic monkey from the barrel of monkeys game, a wooden coin left by some Kentucky geocachers, some good pictures and some wonderful memories.

So, if you own a GPS receiver and want to have some fun, pick a place to visit. Go online and find some caches in the area and go on a treasure hunt.

God Bless you and yours

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