Today our class went geocaching!

First we had a reminder lesson about latitude and longitude, and a how-to with the GPS devices.  Oh, and we talked about what GPS was, too. 🙂  We needed our plan and our GPS devices:

 

Then we were off!  And how lucky we were they today’s weather broke just before we were scheduled to go outside on our hunt.  We’d been watching it rain all morning out our windows, but it was reasonably dry by 1:00.  Yay!

 

The cache we were looking for was hidden across the street from our school at Meramec Community College and was put there by a College for Kids class that learned about geocaching a couple of years ago.  We went walking in that direction, checking our GPS’s as we went.

 

Then we new we were getting close when lots of kiddos started to gather around this tree.  Their directions were to just stand there if they thought they found it–rather than yelling and screaming and spoiling it for everyone else.

 

Then…

We found it!!  Can you see it there?  Even though we didn’t need it, there was a clue on the directions to help if you got stuck.  The clue was: the container is a camouflaged plastic jar.

 

Now, to open it!

Yeah, I know–horrible picture! But inside we found a log book, directions and an explanation, and lots of little trinkets that other geocachers had left before us.  We signed the log book, and I showed them all the other goodies that were inside.

 

We logged in: 9/17/12 Robinson 5th Grade 2012.  We saw that lots of other people had been there since the cache made in 2010.  One entry was from the  Trailblazers group at our school on June 29, 2011, and one was even Anna’s family!  I took a picture of the log book to prove it, but alas, it was blurry, too.  Believe me, her dad signed it with song lyrics! 🙂

I know–corny pic, right?  This one was a card that the person made solely for the purpose of using it to geocache.  He was San Diego, CA!  All the way to that geocache in Missouri.  Very cool.
So after we found this one, Keelan and I took the class to the geocache that Trailblazers (a science/technology club that our librarian, Mrs. Meihaus, and I let the last two years) had created and placed.  We were originally going to hunt for that cache, but we couldn’t find it when we searched for it online. BUMMER!  We took them there and found another huge bummer.

Looked great on the outside, but the bummer was what we found on the inside of our cache:

Half of the things we put in there were gone, and it was all wet and moldy!  YUCK!  This will definitely take some tender-loving-care to get back to the state it was in when we hid it last year.  Boo. 😦

 

Ok, now a few more fun pics that were taken when I gave Fiona the camera, and a group shot.

Say cheese!

 

What a great afternoon of geocaching fun with friends! I know I wish I learned about geography like this when I was a kid. 🙂

Have you ever been geocaching before?  Do you have any suggestions for any good caches we could find? Tell us your stories!