Here there be Treasure!

A beautiful day in early March? They have to be enjoyed. So the wife and I got the puppies and the boy into the Jeep and we headed to the park for a nice walk.

Of course, a beautiful and snow free day on top of the hill where we live isn't always going to mean a beautiful snow free day at the bottom of the hill.

Don't get me wrong - it was still gorgeous and most of the paths were dry and perfect for walking, but as we went deeper into the trees down by the river we quickly found ourselves in some pretty wet snow. We weren't in danger of abandoning the boy if he ended up knee deep in quicksand-like slush or anything like that, but I will say that the boy was the smartest of us by wearing his snow boots while Lisa and I slugged it out in summer weight sneakers.

Even with wet feet, it was a great day and the puppies had a blast with Pandora happily splashing through the wet muck and Penny attempting to stay as dry as possible around the puddles.

About half way around I remembered a little app I had downloaded called c:geo. I booted it up on my phone and 5 minutes later we were on our way to find the closest geocache on the map.

Wait - you know what Geocaching is, right? It's like a treasure hunt - you get the coordinates for a cache and then go find it:

After trying a couple different trails, we were quickly moving in the right direction (through some really soggy trails) and finally found ourselves at the right location. Of course, just because the GPS tells you that you're at the destination, it can't lead you right to the cache. We looked around for 20 minutes, and unknowingly stepped over the cache a couple times each before we spotted it.

We didn't have anything to leave so we didn't take anything, but we did sign the log book and put it back for the next treasure hunters to find.

What started as a short walk ended up being a fun adventure for all of us. It got us all out for the afternoon and definitely made it more exciting.

If walking for the sake of walking doesn't really appeal to you, finding a treasure chest in your own neighborhood is a great reason to get out of the house. Looking at the map, I'm guessing Medicine Hat itself has 100+ caches, so I know we'll have plenty of them to find.

Maybe we'll see you out on the trail!