Placing Sheppy McShepardSons take 1

My boys ... especially Little Brother have been working on making a geocache to hide.

Do you know what a geocache is? If you follow this blog on a regular basis, you have probably noticed our renewed interest in geocaching (see Sheppy's Blog: Geocache), and probably have either figured it out or don't really care. If not, it is basically a global hide-and-seek game using GPS coordinates.

If you are interested in learning more, take a few minutes and check out "Geocaching in 2 Minutes" and / or  "Geocaching 101". Go ahead ... I'll wait.

So, anyway, we have been FINDING geocaches since November 2008. This is our first attempt to hide a geocache. My youngest pretty much took the lead on this one. He found the container, and convinced Mommy to empty it of its previous contents. He talked his dad into taking him to the store and buying Camo duct tape (weird that we didn't have any already ... right?). He applied the tape, found a log book, assembled the contents, and coordinated getting a little information sheet about geocaching printed out and laminated to put in the cache.

Original Contents of Sheppy McShepardSons

After lots of debate, we decided to call the cache Sheppy McShepardSons. Not a great name, but better than most of the others that the kids came up with.

We have experienced a delay in publishing (read on), but once we actually get it approved, you can see it on GeoCaching.com at:

GC4MVY0 Sheppy McShepardSons

Last Saturday, we hid this cache.

We decided to try Mt. Falcon open space park for the hide. We had a couple spots in mind. One of the guidelines is that the cache has to be at least .1 mile (528 feet) from other geocaches, so I loaded all the other caches in the area into my GPS unit before we went.

We found a micro on our way

On our way to our first potential spot, we found a micro geocache, "Keep Out". This was probably the easiest micro I have ever seen.

The first spot we wanted to check was not far from the parking lot. It was in a bunch of rocks that my kids like to climb in whenever we are in this area. We found a perfect spot under a rock under a log. According to my GPS it was far enough away from the other geocaches I had loaded.

It was almost exactly the same distance from Rocky Monkey Cache and 497 Cache.

So, we hid it. I marked the location in my GPS, and we moved on to find a couple more caches in the area.

Later, after entering all the information into GeoCaching.com, a reviewer contacted me letting me know that I was too close to one of the stages of a multi-cache called Multi on Mount Falcon. To be honest, it did not even occur to me to consider multi-caches. But, as it turns out, we cannot use our original desired location.

I retrieved the container early morning before work on the Tuesday after I got the message.

Now we have to find another spot. That is why the page GC4MVY0 Sheppy McShepardSons is not active yet.

We did find a couple more caches on Mt. Falcon, though.

 Rocky Monkey Cache:

 497 Cache:

We also found another one on our way home from the park called Attention Anglers.

 

So, even though our main goal of the day didn't ultimately turn out, the day was a pretty good geocaching success. We were 4 for 4 in our finds. Not bad.

There is one sad note I feel I should share with you ... but I think I'll save that for another blog post. Stay tuned. It has to do with our first travel bug, Guacamole.