Saturday, June 30, 2012

June caches and Cub Scouts

I'll start with Thursdays adventures. Cliff (of Turner and Stitch) and I spent a day at Cub Scout camp to teach kids about geocaching.

I guess I'll start with saying that we had very little info going into this. I had traded a few emails with another geocacher about it, but details were scarce. In fact I had to look up the camp online to find the location. Even then all it said was Ruth-Hyde park which I had never heard of. Turns out to be a camp owned by the Girl Scouts. After some asking around the bank of girl scout mothers I finally got directions. So on the big day we show up and we never saw our contact. The camp manager had no clue we were coming, but was glad to see us. They crossed out soccer on the event sheet and put us in.

Despite the mix up we had a lot of fun. There were well over 100 kids (about 20 at a time every 40 minutes) and only a few in each group had heard or geocaching. We hid some temporary caches on one of the trails up there and let the kids loose after some basic instruction.

Things to know for next year if we are asked again, and if I still live around here
  • Make sure to contact the camp director personally
  • Bring more GPS's
  • Try to get another volunteer or two
  • Put stuff in the caches
My old Garmin legend just wouldn't hold a signal and even my new Garmin 20 seemed a bit off. Lots of tree cover. Would have been better if we had more time to have set up, but we spent a lot of our morning trying to figure out what we were doing.

The kids like to have turns with the GPS and with only a couple of them and 5 temp caches we just couldn't let them all have a turn. It would be nice to have a few extras, but the cheap ones I could get like my Legend just didn't seem to work well enough. One scout mother looking at the GPS which said about 90 feet 30 feet from the cache said "This just isn't going to work, that's not good enough" (Makes me wonder how I ever found 1000 geocaches with it? hahaha)

Anyway my other news is that I found 2 caches today

Home Sweet Home
Shack by the Track?

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