Karin with an I

Monday was a gorgeous day and since it was a holiday the Digital family was left to their own devices for a whooooole day. Some of us (Aidan) voted for a day of sloth and video games, others (Rob) voted to get the hack out of the house and go hiking. Honestly, I was cool with either option. We plotted our trip and loaded up the car, ready to geocache our heads off.

Scooby was in the car first and VERY unhappy that he had to wait to go!

We headed up Wheeler Pass road and into the open desert. A mile in, we found our first treasure!

Aidan gets to pick the treasure out of each cache and for his first prize he chose a green, plastic fish. Yep. Plastic toys are AWESOME. The fish was joined later by a miniature plastic bazooka, and a green goggly watch. We will make a fortune on eBay, I’m sure.

Over the course of the afternoon, we hiked about 6 miles. We zig zagged around, heading closer to the base of the mountain with every step. As we got farther away from the highway, I thought the day was a perfect opportunity to do a little dog training with the Scoobinator. Two minutes later he was off his leash for the first time ever outside our yard! He was fantastic. He’d walk a bit ahead of us, but come running back whenever I called.

The only time he ran off was when he spotted a jack rabbit and gave chase. Aidan practically had a stroke about his dog “running away,” but I yelled twice and Scooby stopped. He wasn’t happy about letting the rabbit go, but he listened and didn’t go any farther.

By the time we headed back to the car, we had one tired dog and an equally weary boy. Our very last stop was a cache we had tried to find earlier in the day to no avail It was called “Rumble Rumble” and the description led us to a large cattle grate in the middle of the road. A what!?! you may be asking yourself if you grew up in a place where isn’t in danger of walking into the road. This is a cattle grate:

This is an especially large one. Scooby had to be carried across because his feet were too little and he kept slipping through the bars. Poor puppy! There were no trees, only a few shrubs, and nowhere to hide a cache! The reason it was so difficult to find is it was a micro cache, making the hunt even harder. Just as I was ready to give up, Rob put his hand on the fence post next to him and POP!

The micro cache was a small prescription medicine bottle epoxied into the top of the fence post. You had to remove the top to find it! Nice job, geocache hiders! Aidan was bummed that there were no treasures, only a log book, in this one. He was too tired to complain about it though.

We arrived home 3 hours later exhausted, yet rejuvenated and ready to tackle our next adventure!