Geocaching at home

I am in my home town for the first time in 3 years. I have had a great time getting to see friends and family over the last week. A fun side activity has been geocaching in familiar places.

Surprise in Toyah, Texas
Thursday evening my family and I were visiting my grandmother in a small town of 100 people. We took time to stroll around town (that took about 30 minutes to see it all) that evening. After we returned to the house my son and I went looking for snakes. My grandmother lives in a desert in your typical run of the mill old west town in Texas. We did not find any snakes, but thought it would be cool to find a geocache in the area that we might could drive to. Imagine our surprise when we fired up the geocaching software on the phone to see that there was one less than two blocks away. A very easy find. I can’t imagine that this one will be visited often, but it is one I won’t forget.

My Aunt and Uncle learn about the game
By Saturday we had returned to my aunt’s house where the visiting family members were staying. We went our separate ways in the morning, but planned to meet up for lunch. My brother and I were going to grab some caches in the afternoon. My aunt and uncle were intrigued by the idea of geocaching and wanted to come with us just to see what it was like. The closest one to the restaurant was in the parking lot.

There were 8 of us wandering around making the find. It was a bit easy and so everyone (except my wife and daughter who had to go home) followed my brother and I to the next one a couple of blocks away. They were all hooked. We drove to a few other caches in 3 different cars until each family member had to take off for other appointments.

My brother, son and I continued the game for a while until we had responsibilities too. Later that night my brother and I picked up the game when we finished the retirement party that had us back home in the first place.

Local police learn about the game
In total we found 14 geocaches and could not put our hands on 4. That was my biggest caching day to date. In the process we even introduced a couple of police officers to the sport. They did not think we were doing anything wrong, but they could not figure out why my brother and I, at 10:30 at night, were wandering around acting like we had lost a contact in the middle of a parking lot. The two officers had to check us out. They thought the game sounded like a good one and actually loaned us a flashlight to put the cache back in place after we found it.

Gunfighter provides a place for a cache
Today we were again visiting my grandmother. But this time, instead of visiting her at home, we were in her church in Pecos, Texas. I preached there this morning. My cousin, who was caching with us Saturday, and her son were with us. After we parted ways with Granny we looked for a cache in town and found one at an old cemetery. The cemetery was the original resting place for famed gunfighter Clay Allison. My cousin’s son was able to make the find. It made his 7 year old heart happy to find the treasure.

It was a great time introducing new people to the sport of geocaching.

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