Off today... what to do?

Oh yeah! Geocaching time! I've been wanting to do some geocaching on the Air Force Base reserve that's open to the public with permit. Went to Niceville and got my permit today and off I went!
Stopped at a beautiful trail that had a couple of geocaches stuffed in it. First up, Ranger Trail. According to my GPS it was about a mile round trip. I shot a few pics. I found this cache with a bike attached to it. I thought it was somebody out there with me. Come to find out, it was part of a travel bug on another destination. On the way back, I took some pics of the creek that ran through it.

On the way back, the trail split off and took me to Stinky Creek. (really, that was the name of the creek) It wasn't smelly though as the name suggests. Maybe I was just more stinky than the creek. There was some guy right behind me that freaked me out at first, not only because I was a mile in the forest, but he came up so fast. Glad it wasn't a bear or something... right?

I hit a couple of micro caches on the way back. One was the Garnier Bayou Eastview and A Walk In The Park. The park had quite a bit of graffiti on it. Like I was entering gang territory. There were a few families around and was nice otherwise.

At Garnier Bayou, it was a teeny, tiny cache in a teeny, tiny park. A lady from a house right next to the waterfront park came out and said hi and asked if I was a bird watcher. As I was signing the log, I said, "yes! Check out that big pelican that just drove in the water?" I was able to shake her before putting the cache back in the hole in the log.

I'm heading home to Texas for Christmas, loaded with 4 Travel Bugs to drop in The Woodlands. I plan on bringing back a bunch for back home in Florida. Merry Christmas, see you soon!

Weekend Mini Marathon

Tried to hit a handfull of caches in Shalimar Saturday afternoon. But we didn't start until around 3:30pm. In our Florida, it starts getting dark at 4pm.... so we tried only two.

We went to Garnier Bayou yesterday for a cache next to Eglin Federal Credit Union at the water. Looked all over the place. I had a pretty good idea where it was, but no luck after about 15 minutes. Afraid to lose daylight, we took off for the next one just outside of Shalimar... Poquito Bayou Overlook. It was a beautiful trail, although I think it was sitting on Air Force property since there were some warning signs nearby. This one was a little tricky since there was so much tree cover and it was getting dark, fast. I wanted to find this particular cache because it had a travel bug in it that I wanted to take to Texas at Christmas time. We finally found it after walking in circles for 20 minutes. When I went to get the bug I wanted, it was gone! But, the people who took it earlier that day left a Jeep Travel Bug, which was pretty cool... snagged it and off we went, until tomorrow.

Today, I got Trale up and went on a Six cache mini-marathon, back to Shalimar. First up was a geocoin I wanted to take to Texas. Trale found this one, way before I did. The kid has eyes like an eagle!!! Grabbed the coin... off we went. We got there just in time. As we were leaving, more geocachers were behind us.

Just down the street was another cache, but we went for some food first and brought it back to The Launching Pad. Had a little trouble with the muggles, so we played around the pier and noticed this strange pine tree that looked like it was trying to crawl into the bay. After the muggles left, we grabbed the cache and back into town.

Our third trip was at Shalimar Playground. We dug all over the place for 20 minutes... no luck. Great little playground! If you blinked, you missed the entrance into the park, which is much bigger than it looks from the street.

We went back to Garnier Bayou and this time we found it. If you were too short, you weren't getting this cache. Plus you had to dig around the palm tree blind to find it. It was about 7 feet in the palm tree in one of the broken off limbs. Great hide!

We came back into FWB and went to a spot I tried before with no luck. Briar N Woods. We found it this time in a stump in the ground. Walked around quite a bit first, like I did last time, but noticed that stump and digging around revealed a nice micro cache!

Cathy's Cache is one I've been putting off for a while because it was in the city cemetary. It was our first find in a cemetary. Kinda cool and creepy too... glad I didn't do this one at night!

Geocaching is so much fun. Trale and I had a great time digging around and finding the many treasures. The Air Force reserve has a bunch of big caches on it. You need a permit to get on, so that's next on the radar.

Until next time, happy geocaching!

Todd