The pride and perils of geocaching

Given Boden's interest in pirates and "treasure", I thought now would be a good time to try out geocaching--searching for hidden treasure!  A fellow gymnastics mom told me a bit about it and showed me the app she used so I downloaded it and we got started on a weekend day when Todd needed a little time for home improvement.  Our first search was successful--it took a little time to find but we met an older lady and her granddaughter whom Boden quickly recruited.  The lady had been geocaching with her husband and knew the cache we were in search of, so we knew we were in the right area.  Finally, we stumbled upon it!  With the confidence of finding our first cache under our belt, I checked the app for another hidden treasure and we headed out.  The second one was a bit of a walk into Carver Park.  After the 5th minute of constant whining about how far we'd walked and "I wish it was closer"s, I was wishing i had brought the stroller (geocaching tip:  have the stroller on hand if the kiddo is going to be helping with the search.).  As my tolerance was wearing thin, the map indicated we were close.  Per the map, we needed to do a little off-roading so we headed up the embankment and started looking high and low (the first one was hanging from a tree, so I thought anything was possible).  There were some downed trees that looked like the perfect place so we zeroed in on that area...then I felt something painful on my leg, looked down, thought it was a huge ant, then Boden yelled--I had stepped on a hornet's nest and they weren't happy.  Boden was getting stung, I was getting stung and trying to get them off him, and we were running and swatting and yelling.  It was awful.  At the end of it all, I had lost my sunglasses, we didn't find the cache, i had at least 15 stings, Boden had about 5 and I was carrying my crying little dude back to the car trying to explain the hornets' behavior and that wouldn't happen every time we went geocaching.  Luckily, we redeemed ourselves 2 days later when I popped Boden in a stroller and we headed off in search of the same cache and my sunglasses.  We found the cache about 15 feet from the hornet spot...but my sunglasses are still out there.  :(

Photo:  our first cache!!