New Adventure!

My daughter, Carly (18) and I have begun a new, exciting hobby. It's called geocaching! Heard of it? In short, people all over the world hide/seek little "treasures" by GPS coordinates. Check out the site here to learn all about it: Geocaching.
I was amazed to find that there are literally oodles in my area, some as close as 0.3 miles away from my house and others in areas I have been to numerous times. There are way over 200 caches in a 30 mile radius from my home location.

For Mother's Day, my 3 daughters and I went on a all-afternoon geocaching excursion up the North Shore (of Lake Superior). While my two younger daughters enjoyed the rocky beach at Kitchi Gammi Park, Carly and I went traipsing through the wooded areas to find a couple caches - and also found another pair of geocachers who were quite nice, hope to run into them again. This may just be a social outlet for me, as friendless locally as I am (Duluth noob).

We drove up a ways and parked on the side of Scenic 61 to get at some "difficult terrain" caches, where I felt I had to prove to my sweet spawn that I can STILL contend with mega-steep grades and intensely rocky shorelines. She acts as if I might break, keel over, or probably more worrisome - faint and she'll have to haul my not-light body up back to civilization. Ha! I was a Marine! I was exploring deep woods when I was old enough to walk, dammit. I'm no spring chicken, but I still know my way around a couple of dense brambles and slippy inclines. Needless to say - she was impressed and now is more interested in geocaching with her not-so-brittle mum.

To sweeten the deal for the non-exploring other girls (one not interested in woods but along for the ride and some possible photographic captures, and the other just happy to be out and about, but not ready for major hiking) I took them to DQ in Two Harbors, where we went and found another cache in the gazebo by the tug, Edna G. I didn't have any ice cream, but I'm on this new healthy eating/exercise kick and okay with that - ice cream isn't one of my temptations anyhow. (Did you know DQ does not sell frozen yogurt? I didn't, but I didn't care much either. I was FULL on family quality time! Yes, that's not only possible, but is sweeter and doesn't go straight to your hips.

To keep this from getting overly lengthy - we had a blast! Seven caches under my belt in one afternoon, quality time with my wonderful girls and, yes, dinner at Duluth Grill.

If you'd like to hear more about my geocaching (fledgling) experiences, let me know! I'd be happy to oblige in some posts.