Personal: Woo Hoo!

It's a happy night, and a wonderful relief too.

I found something fun to do with my daughter, Geocaching. We didn't have a miraculous bonding moment or anything, but it was amusing eventually, and we talked the whole time rather than sitting with our eyes focused on the big screen. She even said she had fun. Praise the Lord.

There's a $100 investment for a handheld GPS unit, but it's worth every penny.

A cache is a little tupperware container full of little toys and a logbook. It is hidden somewhere, and its position is recorded and posted up to Geocache.com with a couple of clues how to find it. As the treasure hunter, my daughter and I took off and found a cache or two. After you find it, you take a toy, and leave a toy plus a couple notes in the little log book, then move on.

From the website:
There are 281971 active caches in 222 countries. In the last 7 days, there have been 180010 new logs written by 30745 account holders.

I can very nearly guarantee that there is a little tupperware cache somewhere near you. There were 4 caches in the lake park my daughter frequents, and there are two in my immediate neighborhood. There are even hundreds in downtown Columbus. That's good, because I learned tonight that my daughter does not really enjoy walking in bug-infested woods. Our next trip will be in the Short North - the yuppie and tattoo corner of Columbus that she really enjoys. It's cool, because it lets her be where she wants to be, and gives me an excuse to be there. We can even stop for a tea or some such if she will indulge me. :-)

If you have kids or friends or spare time or just a desire to get out and walk/jog toward something more than the "turn-around" at the end of the outbound journey, I recommend geocaching. And for those of you creative types (and you know who you are,) you can start leaving cool toys and advance to making up your own caches, planting "travel bugs", and solving or making whole multi-part, all day puzzles.