National Trails Day CITO Event

This past weekend we attended the Natinal Trails Day CITO Event hosted by lake Ouachita State park. I honestly didn't expect to have as much fun as we did. It was just a quick cleanup and then I figured my family and I would hike some trails, grab some caches, and then go swimming finally settling down at our campsite for our favorite dinner: hot dogs and s'mores!

What a surprise that event turned out to be. There wasn't a large turnout but everyone that did had an incredible time! Our host for the event was park interpreter Susan. She did a marvelous job organizing the cleanup and keeping a bunch of easily distracted, sweaty geocachers on task. Of course after all the trash was collected we settled down to a wonderful lunch provided by the park. Afterwards, she even took us out on a enormous tour boat to grab some caches. How cool was that!

Susan's just starting out geocaching and is working on hosting another event this fall at the park. This one will be a campout also. Oh yeah! Our favorite!

We made some new friends over the weekend also. It was the husband and wife caching team of QuartzCachers. I'd spoken to Bruce briefly at other events but had never had the chance until this one to hang out and just chat. Both our families hit it off. Especially the kids! We're going to hook up in Hot Springs to do the Tah-Ne-Co earthcache located in Hot Springs National Park. It will take the better part of a day to do it and ging along with friends just promises for a great day.

ArkGeo 2008 Annual Social

It's been awhile since I updated anything. We've been having a blast!!! So many things going on and so many places we've visited. You just have to love summer!

We were recently featured in an article about geocaching. It was published on May 30th in the Exploring Arkansas insert of the Arkansas-Democrat Gazette. I have to admit it was pretty cool to be interviewed and see our family pictured in the newspaper. You can't see it online anymore without paying for it but I saved it on Photobucket.

We were lucky enough to attend two really spectacular events recently. The first was the ArkGeo 2008 Annual Social. The event was a campout held over the weekend at Lake Catherine Sate Park and it was great. The event Saturday was filled with catching up with old friends and making some new ones. One of those is the caching team of likestocanoe. They are great people. Just some of the nicest , friendliest, I could go on but you get the point. They brought their boat out to the lake and offered to take everyone tubing! WOOHOO! You know my family was first in line. Well, my wife and kids were the only one's who went. A fun day was had by all. The ArkGeo CITO event held the next day wasn't as attended as I had hoped but there was a good turnout. We picked up all the trash we could find. That was a very clean park.

I did get to squeeze in some caching on Saturday night. I hunted the LC Distant Night Cache by SJClimber with a group of other cachers about 11:00 at night. I love night caches. They are really a fun way to hunt a cache. Especially down a trail. It was awesome. We grabbed a couple more caches on the way back before returning to the campfire for some more s'mores, hot dogs, and relaxation. Until the racoons came...

There must have been over a dozen of the late night raiders. Big ones too! They had no fear of humans. You'd chase one off and he'd run and stop just ahead of you and wait for you to give up. It was a war of attrition. They won. After securing all our food stuffs we just sat back and listened to the trash can lids fall. It was hilarious!!

It was a great weekend and we look forward to hopefully more similar events in Arkansas.