It's Monday, I think

We tried geocaching the other day. We downloaded some coordinates that we found to established caches  and went out exploring the country. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and will do it again, however, our learning curve on this new venture looks like this:

The people camped next door to us were from British Columbia and when we struck up a conversation with them it turned out that they were avid geocachers. We were aware of this sport and decided after talking with them that we'd give it a try. They were leaving or they'd have given us some help.

The idea is that a person goes to geocaching.com, locates caches near their location, enters the coordinates into a GPS and proceeds to locate a cache at the coordinates that has been hidden by someone. Usually there's a logbook to record your find.

It took us about 2 hours to figure out how to use the GPS. This RV park is not posted as a 55+ park but there were no technologically advanced young people around to lend a hand.

Then we struck out on foot. I read the part about the cache being 1.1 miles from our camp but Dick's GPS  didn't clarify distances like that so he just started off across the restricted area of desert adjacent to our camp with me following blithely behind holding my sunglasses and the instruction manual wishing I had remembered emergency rations or at least a water bottle. Occasionally I'd look back over my shoulder to make sure the trailer was still visible. (I'm big on line-of-sight) Finally I encouraged him to take his eye off the GPS screen and look around and we headed back to camp, about a quarter of a mile away, hopped in the truck and took off down the road.

We got close to the area we were looking for and saw another car parked there with people milling around. We were excited because we thought we'd be able to get some help on the geocache but it turned out they were looking for a location their Grandpa had taken them to years ago. Reading between the lines I think they might have been looking for a good place to scatter Grandpa's ashes. Hopefully they'll put the coordinates into their GPS and be able to find the spot again. We got close on our cache, enjoyed hiking a little, found a wide assortment of broken bottles and unique rocks but no cache.

Our second try took us through the town of Salome (the town sign reads where she danced, but we pronounced it sa-LOAM not like Herod's step-daughter) out a paved road, onto a dirt road, up a gravel road where I shifted into 4WD and up a short mountain. The cache was called Nuts over Salome because it was hidden in a plastic Kirkland nut jar and overlooked the valley. The view was beautiful, the walk was enjoyable, I got some more pictures, but unfortunately the heavens didn't open and a ray of light expose the cache and it remained hidden from out view.

[Please turn your computer to the side to look at this picture.]
When we got back to camp I took a look at the Geocaching  book to find out a little more about our new sport. The book says that GPSs are accurate to about 50 feet. That doesn't sound like much when you are looking for Wal-Mart or a Dairy Queen but a nut jar or a baby food jar? Give me a break. We did have lots of fun and saw some interesting country. We're going to try it again at our next campsite, Liberty Haven Ranch between Wickenburg, named for the guy who found the Vulture Mine, and Phoenix.

Later, Lynn and Dick

PS The Geocache book said that the first established cache was in the Beavercreek area! How about that!

PPS We found this sweet little roadside chapel: