Geocaching Minnesota June 2024

We made a trip to Minnesota in mid-June and did a lot of geocaching while there (thus it gets its own post).

Near Adams Hill Pond, we didn't find one by the shore of the pond since rain had raised the water level well past the geocache. Nearby, we found Insert Creative/Punny Name Here in a tree. Also nearby is Farmhouses of Richfield - John McCabe House, which is a nano in the neighborhood of the original house from the 1850s (though clearly the owners have made additions over the years).

Farmhouse with additions

Then we found New Years - LPC since it was near a restaurant where we were having Father's Day Brunch. We showed some friends where the geocache was to get them hooked into the hobby. The next find was near our hotel. Earl Brown Heritage Center is a virtual cache on some farm land that had an airport but is now a conference center. The center retains the rustic image while having a lot of high tech stuff. It was a bit frustrating for us because we had to walk all the way around the conference center to make the find--we were unable to cut through the middle!

A turkey wandering around the center, +1 for farminess

Look of a farmhouse, another +1

Electric sign and glass doors, -many points!

Nearby is a multi-cache found in the local library. The library was still open, so we were able to find Brookdale Library cache inside one of the book. We asked one of the librarians for help, but she was on loan from another branch and didn't know about the geocache!

A library hide!

We drove over to Chanhassen to look around and make some finds. The local post office sponsors two caches with puzzles based on the bank of P.O. boxes, PO Puzzle Series - Chanhassen (Mystery) and PO Puzzle Series - Chanhassen (Multi). We worked our way through an Adventure Lab and its final mystery cache that toured some historic buildings in the town. 

The 1800s train depot

One of Chanhassen's claims to fame is that the musician Prince lived here and set up a recording studio. We visited the studio, which was closed. Nearby we found MN Music: Paisley Park Studio and Purple Rain, both in walking distance of the studio. 

Paisley Park Studio

After driving far north in the state, we visited Tall Tales - Virtual Rewards 2.0. We were in Bemidji, which is the home base for this guy:

Famous locals and me

The park with the Paul Bunyon statue also has the traditional cache BecidaGang#1 not too far away. I needed a traditional to fill a calendar day, so it was a very helpful find.

In between Bemidji and Saint Paul we found Follow Lexie to the Letterbox, a challenging find because we ran into some woods that had clouds of insects in the air. The find was traumatic but successful. I took no pictures because of the conditions. Much easier and at a playground, The Ponds OGCP was an easier find and had something to keep my youngest occupied.

A fun outdoor experience!

At another playground park I found two cache, My lost ball and Pervade. I only got a picture of the ball field from the cache.

View to the ball field

Later in the day, we went down to Elk River where I found MNSQ: Saint Andrews Cemetery, an intriguing multicache, and Ridgewood East Park that had the coolest little free library I have ever seen. It is an amazing replica of the front door from Fellowship of the Ring movie. When you open the door, the Hobbiton theme music plays. 

The road goes ever on and on

Bag End

A peek inside

In Cambridge, Minnesota, I found Smell good for church which was full of wasps (so I didn't sign it) and Turkish Delight by the local library, which had an awesome container.

Somewhere in this picture

Further south I found another Prince-themed cache: Purple Rain - A Tribute to a Music Legend. It was a Wherigo cache with a few locations and trivia questions that required some internet research to answer. The final find for the day was Tanner Cul-De-Sac in the neighborhood of our cousins.

The OG Dancing Gophers

Cousins

On our last day, we found the Wherigo Hasta La Vista, Baby, a Terminator-themed challenge that only required two internet searches. Later, we found Indian Mounds Park Overlook, an earthcache by a Native American burial site.

View is better in winter?

Our finale in Minnesota was the Adventure Lab Murals and Art of East 7th Street. We were unable to find the bonus cache since it started raining. See our rundown of the murals here.

We ended the trip at 1314 cache finds, a nice addition of 34 caches. 

Game Review: Exit the Game: The Lord of the Rings: Shadows Over Middle-earth by Kosmos

Exit the Game: The Lord of the Rings: Shadows Over Middle-earth designed by Inka and Marcus Brand and published by Kosmos

Gandalf the Grey has chosen you to help out a small band of Hobbits on a special mission. You're job is simple--distract the forces of evil while Frodo Baggins sneaks his way off to where ever it is Gandalf has sent him. Hmm...maybe it's not so simple. But it is exciting. 

The game has the usual contents--instruction manual, decks of cards, game journal, and a lot of random items. Like other Exit Games, players work their way through puzzles one at a time, using a page of the journal, some cards, and some objects to find a code that shows you've found the correct solution. 

Spoiler-free look at the contents

Each puzzle has the players making notes on the back of a map of Middle Earth, building up to a final puzzle. The puzzles run the usual gamut from easy to difficult and we only used a hint once because it was one of those "look at things from a certain angle" puzzles that we find tedious because we can never quite get the right angle from which to look. Rather than spend way too much time trying to get it right and certainly getting frustrated, we looked at the hint card. The puzzles do move away from the initial theme of distracting the bad guys at some points which was noticeable but not distracting. It's Lord of the Rings, after all. Who doesn't want to fix the shards of Narsil or use the beacons to alert Rohan. 

As a side note, we were missing some components which we only discovered in mid-play. Two of the punch-boards for mysterious items were not in the box! The Kosmos website was easy to navigate and request replacement parts. They came in less than a week! That was a very pleasant experience.

We had a good time playing this. As usual, we didn't time ourselves since we play these for the fun of the puzzles, not the speed score. A good time was had by all.

Recommended, highly for Lord of the Rings fans.

Book Review: The Fall of Gondolin by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Fall of Gondolin by J. R. R. Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien

The evil reign of Morgoth is almost universal. After the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, men and elves were defeated and enslaved. The elf Turgon survived the battle and fled to the hidden city of Gondolin. The city is surrounded by high mountains that are protected by magic, vigilance, and the great eagles of old. Tuor is a man of noble birth who spent much of his youth enslaved to one of Morgoth's minions. He escapes and is drawn on a quest to find Gondolin. He is inspired and guided by Ulmo, the Lord of Waters. As Tuor wanders over vast stretches of Middle Earth, he finds the elf Voronwe who accompanies him on the journey. They eventually discover Gondolin. There Tuor weds the princess and becomes part of the great battle that finally happens when Morgoth discovers the location of the city (through the treachery of a bitter rival of Tuor). As readers might guess from the book's title, the battle ends tragically.

This book is a compilation of various versions of the story written by Tolkien over some thirty-five years. The first text was written in the midst of World War I; the final text written in the early 1950s. Each version is presented with some introductory remarks. The story has a lot of the earmarks of an ancient epic--the wandering hero, the sweeping landscapes, the interventions of the gods, the great battles, etc. A final chapter provides a comparison of the various texts, showing how they fit together (the consistency is fairly amazing) and where they differ (often focusing on different details).

I enjoy heroic epics so this book has a lot of appeal to me. The style is very old-fashioned, like this description when they first see Gondolin:

Then they looked up and could see, and lo! they were at the foot of steep hills, and these hills made a great circle wherein lay a wide plain, and set therein, not rightly at the midmost but rather nearer to that place where the stood, was a great hill with a level top, and upon that summit rose a city in the new light of the morning. [p. 50]

I delight in that style of writing but can see how it would be off-putting for others. The characters are not the deepest. They do evoke respect and sympathy through their actions and live fascinating lives. The Fall of Gondolin is a great triumph for Morgoth but is not the end of the story for the First Age of Middle Earth. Christopher Tolkien writes that it will be his last work editing his father's stories together, so this is probably the last "new" material to be published.

Recommended, highly for Tolkien fans.

Book Review: The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun written by J. R. R. Tolkien and edited by Christopher Tolkien

Old Norse and Germanic tales were a huge influence on J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. He was a university professor specializing in philology, studying ancient languages and texts. Among the works he studied were the old Norse and Icelandic poems (called Edda) along with the later prose work Volsunga Saga. He re-wrote the poems concerning the hero Sigurd, who slays the dragon Fafnir, takes his horde of gold, frees the Valkerie Brynhild, and winds up at the court of the Niflungs (known in German as the Nibelungs). His life there proves to be his undoing as the princes's mother uses witchcraft to mix up their fates, resulting in sorrow and death for pretty much everybody. Tolkien called this poem "The New Lay of the Volsungs," the Volsungs being Sigurd's family. He imitates the terse and alliterative style of the Edda poems to great effect:

'Men sing of serpents
ceaseless guarding
gold and silver
greedy-hearted;
but fell Fafnir
folk all name him
of dragons direst,
dreaming evil.' [p. 101]

Tolkien also wrote "The Lay of Gudrun," about Gudrun, the daughter of the Niflungs who is wedded to Sigurd, even though he pledged his troth to Brynhild. A tale of betrayal and revenge spins out, resulting in the overthrow of the Niflungs by a foreign king.

This book contains the texts of both poems along with a general introduction on the style of the writing. The introduction is mostly by Tolkien's son Christopher but based on notes from Tolkien's lectures. Christopher also provides commentary and footnotes at the end of each poem. Appendices have more background information on the poems.

The poems themselves are the highlight of the book. They communicate the story with vivid style. The introduction is well worth reading for background on the poems, their writing, and their structure. I was able to appreciate the Lays much more. The commentaries are also helpful, though probably not as necessary for a second reading. Seeing elements that show up in Tolkien's later works (like a cursed ring, etc.) is a fun discover. Overall, the book is highly satisfying reading.

Book Review: The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Lord of the Rings is an epic fantasy novel published in the 1950s. It was published in three volumes and is often (understandably) mistaken for a trilogy. It is one continuous story and is available nowadays as a single volume.

The story follows the adventures of Frodo Baggins, nephew to Bilbo Baggins, the title character from The Hobbit. In that book, Bilbo found a strange magic ring that made him invisible. In this book, he reluctantly passes on this treasure to Frodo. They are both friends with Gandalf, a wizard who passes through their home town of Hobbiton every now and again. Gandalf suspects the ring has more to it than the hobbits know; through research he discovers it might be the one ring forged by Lord Sauron in Mount Doom to give him power over the other races of Middle Earth. The ring was lost for hundreds of years after Sauron lost a battle to an alliance of men and elves. Something must be done with the ring now, so Gandalf sends Frodo on an epic adventure to dispose of the ring.

The novel is an amazing work of world-building. Middle Earth is a vast expanse populated by a wide variety of races who all have distinct histories, qualities, and languages. The history of the land is long and bits of that history keep coming out as the adventurers continue their journey. Middle Earth is a fully-realized other world.

The moral imagining of the world is also impressive. Though God is never mentioned, the characters (especially Gandalf) often note the providential nature of events. When Frodo arrives in Bree to meet Gandalf, the wizard is not there. In stead, Frodo meets Strider, a northern ranger, who helps them on their way. Gandalf had left a note to be forwarded on to Frodo instructing him to hurry along but it was never delivered. Gandalf is kidnapped right after leaving the note. If it had been delivered, Frodo would not have found Gandalf or Strider. It's a case of dumb luck or divine providence. The characters acknowledge providence even if they never mention God.

The morality in the book is deeper and more complicated than it is often given credit for. Characters struggle to choose the right thing to do and sometimes they choose wrongly because of their own personal flaws or doubts. Boromir, one of the fellow travelers with Frodo, tries to take the ring to use it as a weapon against Sauron. That choice causes a lot of immediate problems (including dividing the group just as a band of orcs attacks). He realizes his mistake and valiantly dies fighting the orcs. He has a moment of redemption. Few characters are irredeemably evil or perfectly competent.

The Lord of the Rings is a triumph of narrative fiction and is, in my opinion, the greatest novel ever written.

For more commentary on the book, check out A Good Story is Hard to Find's discussion, Part One and Part Two.