Our first find!!

So...armed with our borrowed GPS, Geo Jye (our 12yr old son) and Geo Mum (me), set off to find our first cache on the 14th of April '08.
I had chosen the cache 'DISNEY CENTRAL' by Tegator as it was apparently a good one for kids and had a Disney theme. We had chosen a Lion King Disney toy to swap once we found the cache.
Not too sure what happened this day but Geo Jye and myself ended up walking miles and miles, up hills and down dales with the cache nowhere to be found. :(
Through golf courses where the only things of value were rakes, under tunnels full of colourful graffiti...back in the car to see if we could get closer to the cache by driving around another route...and back to walking up hills and down dales again...literally...

We did manage to find this frog sat right in the middle of our walking track though and luckily for us it sat still while we hit 'stealth mode' and I grabbed a photo:



One problem...we both felt like complete idiots when we realised this was, in fact, a BROKEN TENNIS BALL!! Der!!

Feeling rather hard done by we came home and I jumped back on the Net and the GeoCaching forum to find why or where we could be possibly going wrong.
At which time Geo Dad (Michael) came home from work, seen what we were doing, had a look at the co-ordinates in Google Earth and said 'Oh I know where that is!!'. Hmmm....Geo Jye and I had spent hours on this already and Geo Dad knew where it was just by looking at Google Earth for 2 minutes?? Unbelievable, but true!!

So we threw the kids in the car..drove the 1.4kms from our house and found the cache in under 10 minutes. Well...Geo Dad did anyway...Geo Mum was still feeling rather rejected after the walk she'd done that day only to realise she was nowhere near the cache in the first place!

So it was smiles all round when the kids realised what this new hobby was going to be all about. Finding treasure!!



Geo Dad had the pleasure of filling in the log book:



And the Geo Kids swapped the Disney Lion King toy for a European water bottle and a rubber Ninja Turtle.



So, our very first find really was a team effort and enjoyed by all involved!
Thanks to Tegator for a great kid friendly cache. :)
Cheers
Sharryn :)

Introducing.....

TEAM THOMSON

A bit about how we came across this wonderful new hobby...
I am a scrapbooker and recently went on a scrapbooking Retreat and met a lovely lady who told me all about this fabulous 'other' hobby of hers that she shared with her husband and family called 'Geo Caching'.
She told me how she'd lived in her area for many years but through this sport she had found many places of local interest she had never before heard of.
Hmmmmm...interesting. Living in South West Sydney in a locality that is quite central to bush, beach and the city and being a family of outdoorsy types it sounded right up my alley.
So from there...the seed was planted.
Upon returning home from the scrapbooking Retreat I explained to my husband and kids about the new hobby I had heard about and how I thought it would be a real interest to us all as a family, I promptly did a Google search and found the websites needed for more information.
To cut a long story short, we borrowed my brother in laws' Garmin GPS a couple of weeks ago to 'have a taste' before outlaying money for yet another gadget we may not use but in those couple of weeks have had more fun exploring our local area than ever before!!
So we are now on the lookout for our very own GPS (Garmin preferred) to embark on an awesome new hobby involving the whole family (and there are 8 of us!!).
Here, I will post about our travels, our finds, share photos and hopefully one day soon, our hides.
Cheers
Sharryn :)