VEISHEA and Geocaching

We awoke to snow on Saturday morning. We immediately altered our plan to drive to Ames for the VEISHEA parade. Instead, we slept until the girls woke up, ran a few errands, and arrived in Ames just as the parade was ending. We met up with some fellow alumni and ate lunch at Hickory Park. Little Squirt enjoyed the birthday serenade when her ice cream arrived.

We then went geocaching with a friend from college and her 11 year old daughter. We soon were glad that S. is tall and nimble for her age. After we put all our brains together she was able to scale a dead tree to capture the cache. We felt pretty good following the find, despite being 200 yards from a tent pitched by a homeless person. This cache was rated average difficulty with an above average terrain. After this success we felt ready to tackle some easy rated ones.

We looked for 3 and found none of them. On the third one we went on a wild goose chase. The first clue was that the cache was not at the stated coordinates and gave a clue where to find them. We found some numbers and plugged them in and those coordinates were within a mile of where we were, so we jumped in the cars and left the park we were in. The clues had something to do with Charlie Brown and It's the Great Pumpkin. As we were driving to the next coordinates, we met a car with personalized plates "pumpkins". We were a little freaked out, but took it as a strange sign that we were on the right track. When we arrived at the new coordinates, we discovered it was a park with a name of one of the Peanuts characters, and found that to be interesting also, and thought we may have been on the right track. We wondered around the park and found nothing. I'm very baffled by this one.

Some day, when we find this one, we're going to laugh about this day.

After saying farewell to our out-of-state friends, we stopped at Target and used some coupons. I think we left with about $15 worth of savings and only spent about $62. That was fun. The squirts also had some fun money to spend and they had fun choosing coloring books and movies.