Holiday Caching and an FTF

My sister-in-law and her family are here visiting for the holiday. We just got cleaned up from a morning of paintball fun (but that's a different story all together) and I sat down to check email. While I'm sitting there two new caches pop up. One puzzle and one regular. Our visitors have only been caching once before - when they visited last time - and they've never done a puzzle cache before.

I printed the cache page out and handed it to my brother-in-law. After a few minutes he had it solved. Then I explained that these two caches had just popped up and that if we left now we might be able to get the coveted "first to find" honors (I explained what that was, too).

After a few minutes we had a group of six of us who wanted to go and a list of 10 caches that we might be able to grab - including the two FTF's. Of course each kid that came wanted to have a GPS so I had to load 4 other GPS's with waypoints (and charge the batteries that were dead). Loading only takes a few seconds with GSAK but charging took 15 minutes - and every minute counts when hunting FTF's in this area.

We headed straight for the first FTF attempt. ROCKIN' by KC0TWB. By the time we made it to the cache site the listing had been published for around an hour. The group was hopeful that the FTF might still be possible but I wasn't so sure. An hour is a long time in these parts.

After some hunting the kids finally found it (only a couple of small hints to get them going in the right direction). They were impressed by the container and the work put into it. I think they're beginning to like this game!! We opened the log and, yep, we were too late. We were 3rd to find. The kids wanted to trade all the SWAG so I pulled out the SWAG Bag and added a bunch of trinkets to the cache.

That one didn't result in an FTF but we had one more chance - the puzzle that my brother-in-law solved. We all piled back into the car and headed straight to that one (passing some other caches along the way in hopes of an FTF).

The next one was TXT4FUN by meralgia. When we pulled up I thought to myself another one of these (no, not an LPC but another popular hide in parks). As we approached I thought, yep it should be over there. The kids thought so, too, and started searching the area. I stood there watching the other five search and noticed something just a little different. Humm, that looks interesting. I meandered over and took a look - trying not to get the attention of the other five. Yep that's it - very cool! My sister-in-law saw me look at it and now we're playing the waiting game - giving hints every so often to get the group in the right spot. One of them even said, "What's a _____ doing there?" (sorry can't give too much away) But he didn't go check it out. We finally gave enough hints so the kids all found it.

We opened the container hoping that the log book might be blank. Slowly we opened the log book and VIOLA! A blank log book. WooHoo! We were first to find!

That was a fun find and now they're hooked. We continued the day finding more caches in the area, including the ones we passed on our way to the FTF. In all we nabbed 7 before heading home for dinner.

That night my brother-in-law ordered a Garmin Colorado 400t from Amazon. It will be here on Tuesday so we can play with it.

Note: the pictures are not from the caches mentioned in this posting so they are not spoilers for those caches. They are other caches we found today.