We found one!

See?

We actually found two and a half yesterday. Sarah's holding the one she found. It was a toughie. We almost gave up and were about to give up when I found the annoying little note that said "keep looking," which of course annoyed us all enough to keep us hunting. We didn't bring anything to trade but we remembered to sign the log that time.

The first one of the day was harder than it should have been. It's supposed to be a three part hunt but we only found the first marker and couldn't even get to the second set without going on private property. We figure we're doing something wrong there.

The second one we gave up on after looking for 15 minutes and only finding an animal carcass and poison ivy (which we all avoided thank goodness.) The one Sarah is holding in the picture is our third cache we looked for. The fourth was also successful. I found that.

I have to report that the kids had a ball. They were sad when we had to quit; they asked when we could go out geocaching again. I can see why it's become so popular. It's so easy to just grab a few and it's perfect for families.

If you don't have a handheld GPS unit, you can also try Letterboxing. It's what geocaching started as and is still going on. There are websites for it too.

For the geocaching coordinates, we started at http://www.geocaching.com/ It's a huge website and it has the capability of downloading the coordinates directly to our Garmin GPS. (which is good because Sarah's lost the instruction book and we can't figure out how to enter coordinates when you aren't standing at the place you want to find.)