A year , and a summer break.

It's an exciting time!  We have already passed the one year anniversary of the Travel Bug that Started it All (pretentious capitalization intended) and rapidly approach the one year anniversary of my first "official" caching day in two weeks.  While I have taken a good amount of time off (hence the dearth of posts) I would like to give a shout out to some things this past year that have made this hobby so much fun:

• Geocaching.com - without this site, none of the rest of this would be possible.
• My Garmin eTrex 20 - while I did use Google maps for a while, this really sold me on caching.
• The geocaching subreddit - loads of ideas and conversations to keep me going, even when I can't get out and cache myself.
• My friends and family members who've put up with my obsession - you know who you are.
• All cachers everywhere!  As much as item #1, without such an active community, this hobby wouldn't exist.

Now that that's out of way, here's my standard "I've been too busy - catching up now!" post:

• Health is 100% back to normal, so that's a plus.
• We just had Jack's 8th birthday party, so I sank a month into making Minecraft props instead of going outside to cache.
   
  

  

  They look deceptively simple, but the creeper alone (green guy) took something like 8 hours to put together.

• It has technically been an "IT Emergency" at work since the first week of June, and since I'm the entire IT department it has really put a dent in my lunchtime caching runs.

I did manage to snag an FTF a few weeks back - King's Family Tree is located relatively close to work, and I needed to take a break after a few weeks of non-stop computer crisis issues.  I've also managed to go caching both alone and with Jack and Emily twice now over the holiday weekend, so things are looking up.

The other news is that I am going to be doing a short Geocaching event for my son's cub scout troop sometime in the coming weeks.  I'm setting up demo caches in Smedley Park; real containers, really hidden, but not posted on the website or anything.  I'm just creating GPX files and making handouts, to give the kids an idea about what caching is all about.  I'm going to be breaking quite a few rules, such as distance (I'm hiding 2-3 per spot, and the total distance for about 6 spots [12-18 hides] is probably 750 feet), and I may or may not have log sheets and trinkets in them... though I'm leaning toward doing something to make it a little more engaging for the kids.

I'll post details and pics when I do it, so if anyone else is into this kind of thing it can be used as a model for your event.

That's it for now.  As I start getting back into caching, I'll start making more posts. 

Later on!