My Son Saved Our First Geocache Adventure
My wife and I decided today was a spectacular day to get outside and walk through nature, so we decided to give geocaching a try. For those unfamiliar, geocaching in it’s most basic sense is when someone hides a small package somewhere, and others need to hunt it down. Obviously, it can get more involved, but that’s the gist. It’s like a treasure hunt – which is how we marketed it to my four-year-old son!
Our travels led us back to my old stomping grounds at the Heritage Quarries in Lemont, a GORGEOUS spot to hike and fish with beautiful water-filled limestone quarries.
So we finally get to our target cache (N 41° 41.139′ W 087° 58.747′). GPS and cell phones can only get you so close before you have to put on your hunting hat and really get down and dirty to find the package, which in our case was a small pill bottle – not easy to find in the middle of the woods!
To be honest, I was ready to pack it in. We had been looking for 15 or 20 minutes, our two year old was getting anxious. I was prepared to call off the search and enjoy the rest of our day, but my son wasn’t having it! In a very polite voice, he would encourage us to keep searching, “Well, we haven’t found it yet, dad, so we better keep looking!”
OK, bud. Sure, let’s keep looking. I thought for sure he’d get frustrated and want to walk away.
To the contrary! The kid looked harder and harder until eventually, between a small limestone rock and a tree, he saw the bottle. It was black from the dirt, but the guy who hid it even painted the cap black! Tricky tricky!
Max’s face LIT. UP! when he found the cache. I was so impressed he stuck with it!
I hope you have a chance to enjoy the quarries in Lemont sometime if you haven’t yet. Maybe download the Geocaching app (and pack an extra battery to charge your phone) and try the hunt for yourself. It was a lot of fun!
