I Hate Winter!

I hate winter. Really. I enjoy being able to get outdoors and not be covered in ticks or tangled in vast amounts of undergrowth, but it's just not the same. My wife hates cold weather and just refuses to be out in it. It's also not too good for our kids to be outside in the cold as we usually have one or two rounds of some form of illness cycle through the house every year at this time. So far so good though.
I have had a few opportunities to go out by myself but I've discovered that I just really don't want to!? Which kind of surprised me. I always thought I'd hunt down any cache given a chance to do so but apparently that isn't true. If we can't go together then I'm just not very interested. The fun for me is when we go out and spend time together. I love it! We have a blast geocaching.
We were lucky enough to attend the "Cache Ca$h Dash Bash" held in Paris Arkansas. The event is hosted by paris1time and is in my humble opinion one of the two best events in the state. The second being the ArkGeo 2008 Annual Social and CITO the following day. That may be biased though since we LOVE camping. LOL.
The event was great and it is amazing how rejuvenating attending an event can be. Living where we do there are few geocachers and few geocaches. There is no community and therefore it's kind of hard to get motivated to hide caches knowing they will rarely get visited. That's going to have to change though. Not because I believe that we really need more caches out there, (I wasn't kidding when I said they are rarely hunted) but apparently some geocachers (ahem...Pat and Jerry) planted the bug in our fourteen year olds' ear that there needed to be more geocaches around Scott County. So as of this post, six days after the event, he's bugged me about it multiple times EVERY day! So just a note to you guys, I will get even. LOL. Needless to say I'm trying to get more hides out there. NEVER underestimate the persistence of a teenager.:)
We've been doing a lot of geocaching in Fort Smith recently and have had a ball. There are some really good caches there. We're trying to boost our numbers in order to reach 100 finds before I die. LOL. If everything goes as planned we should have 750 (hopefully more) by the end of 2009. That's the target anyway. It's easier now with the kids a little older. They're more involved in the hunt which allows us search for the smaller caches more often. They LOVE finding micros. Still not as much as the larger caches with "treasure" but they are enjoying it more.
We're in the preliminary stages of planning some events this year. We have a location for a CITO picked out and that looks to be a go so far. We want to host another CITO but we'll have to see. We're also thinking of hosting a "Meet and Greet" type of event most likely in Mena. I thought that would be a good way to get everyone in this area a chance to meet and hopefully build a community. Irregardless, it's going to be an awesome year full of fun. Once it warms up that is. I hate winter.