Geocaching June 2019

June saw the return of some geocaching. I went to Howard County's Western Regional Park which has quite a few caches inside. I did not find them all, sadly, but it isn't too far away. If we are out in the neighborhood for other reasons, we will definitely try to finish them.

A short series of caches were created by a Girl Scout as part of her Silver Award project. The first one I found was Caramel deLites, just off a trail near playgrounds and ball fields. To an experienced cacher, the location seemed obvious.

The location is somewhere in this picture

 The cache was a small box, so I was able to sign the log and trade some stuff. I had some Where's Waldo buttons so I left one and took a cool little gem.

The cache and contents

Plastic gem with this year's date!

Not far away was ThinMints, a microcache that's hidden in an obvious spot. My only problem was my phone GPS pointing in the wrong direction. I could have saved a bunch of time if I had just trusted my instincts. 

On the trail of ThinMints

 My next cache was All Aboard!!, which was supposedly 0.2 miles from ThinMints. Unfortunately, that distance is as the crow flies. The park trails never pointed directly to the cache, so I spent a lot of time circling around on the 0.2-mile perimeter. I finally made progress when I hit a path going straight to a fire department station.

The cache, ahead in 0.1 miles!

Sadly, I got to about two hundred feet from the cache when the path ended and turned into a rather thick downhill bushwhack.

What the forest!?!

Since it was getting late (I had to pick up my son and his friend from a training class), I decided to head back to the car and try again on another day from another direction. Or bring longer pants and maybe a rope?