Nana Tries Out A New Hobby

Retirement can't be all reading, writing and sleeping in between vacations.  Apparently I'm supposed to do other fun things.  Cleaning the house and doing yard work don't count as fun.  Not that I do a whole lot of either of those activities!

Today the spouse and I tried out a new activity, geocaching.  The official geocaching site defines it as:

"Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online."

When we looked online, there were lots of caches hidden all around Hermiston.  We've not been motivated to ride our bikes.  We thought that this would be a fun way to get some exercise .  We could ride our bikes to a location and search for the treasure!

This afternoon we downloaded the coordinates of a cache that is close to our home.  The website allows you to search for locations by zip code.  There was a long list of locations in Hermiston...one of which is the park across the river from our backyard. 

We rode our bikes to the park and then checked the GPS.  We had to walk a little bit further north and west.  The GPS is very sensitive.  We arrived at the exact coordinates and started searching.  The cache can be hidden under rocks, but not buried.  We could see where others had walked in the brush before us.  Paul finally found the tiny plastic container attached by a magnet to the underside of a park bench.

Inside the container was a log and a pink plastic ring.  I entered my information on the log sheet (Nana was already taken when I registered on the geocache site, so I had to go with MissNana as my log in) and I exchanged an Oregon pin for the pink plastic ring.  I wanted a souvenir from our first cache.

I think we'll keep doing this. It gives us a purpose to ride bikes and it was fun to find the treasure.  I've already checked out what sites are available in Austin...I think the granddaughters would like to go treasure hunting with Nana!