It has finally happened. I got to spend the day geocaching.
The boys spent the weekend with my parents so on Sunday the Island Girl and I drove over to Gulf Breeze and went on a much anticipated cache hunt with my dad.
The boys wanted to stay with Na-Na so Dad, Island Girl and I climbed in the truck and headed out.
The first cache on our list was dad's new cache - Shoreline South #1. He wouldn't give us any help so I started studying the GPS and decided which trail to take. Of course I missed a very obvious clue right off the bat but I still managed to find the right path.
He doesn't want me to write anything or post pictures here that will give the cache away so I'm just going to say that it's a great hide. He picked a good spot and I'm sure the cachers who look for this one will enjoy the experience.
After we found his cache we looked for the CITO 2005 cache that is in the same park. Dad found this one on Saturday after hiding his cache so I took the lead. We had to do a little minor bushwacking down the fence line of the dog park but once we got to the end of the fence the woods cleared to a good open trail.
The GPS took me right to ground zero where I beat around a palmetto bush for a couple of minutes with no luck. The mosquitoes were huge and hungry so it didn't take long before I told Dad that I wanted to buy a clue.
He showed me a hollowed out tree next to the palmetto and I leaned around to look and just knew the cache would be there but the tree was empty. I stood back up and as I was thinking "the cache is missing" I looked up and there it was on a tree limb overhead. We both agreed the hollow spot was the obvious place and that putting the cache overhead threw us off. Great hiding spot!
Shoreline Park is a beautiful park on Santa Rosa Sound and I always enjoy coming here.
Our next stop was Where's Bubba.
This cache is a reminder of Gulf Breeze's famous UFO days.
For those of you who don't know - Gulf Breeze was the location of MANY UFO sightings back in the 1980s. People came from all over to watch for them and a lot of people swear they saw one.
A few years later a home was sold and supposedly a fake UFO was found in the attic. The owner of the home denies any knowledge of the fake and believes it was planted by teenagers as a way to discredit his many UFO sightings. The cache is located in Shoreline North park and don't you know that we saw a UFO!
We even have a picture to prove it
Looks like a UFO doesn't it?
It's actually a disc thrown by a man playing disc golf.
This park has one of the only real disc golf courses in the area and while we were there we talked to a man who was practicing.
I had no idea disc golf was such a popular sport and to really show my age - I thought disc golf was Frisbee. The discs are much heavier and are thrown down a fairway for points. Seems like an interesting game but much harder than it looks.
We wandered around the mostly dry lake until we found ground zero and then we spent a long time poking around a palmetto bush.
There was a log off to the side and I looked around it for a minute but Dad had my snake stick so I didn't look too hard. After beating the bush for quite a while we were just about ready to give up when I suggested Dad poke around the backside of the log and of course there it was.
He laughed and said he wished I'd have pointed the log out before he spent 10 minutes beating the palmetto.
Next we were after a cache in a small park on Escambia Bay so off we went. This park is a water access park with a long boardwalk down to the Bay.
The cache is hidden at the beginning of the boardwalk and the GPS tells us the cache is in the brush. Thick brush with several spider webs strung across the non-trail. I was VERY glad Dad was willing to go in LOL He almost needed a machete to go 5 feet off the boardwalk!
Our next cache was the George Spends The Day Fishing Cache at the foot of the 3 mile bridge.
What a great cache!
I love caches that offer a history lesson. To get the coordinates for the actual cache you have to wander both sides of the park reading placards that give information about the history of this area.
Information about shipwrecks that have been found in Pensacola Bay, old letters regarding the area and other interesting facts make this a very interesting walk. I've lived here forever and never knew there was a walkway under the bridge that connects the 2 parks.
We wandered around reading the signs, watching the fisherman and enjoying the incredible view of the Bay.
We gathered all of the info we needed to find the cache but when we got to the spot there were teenage muggles fishing pretty much at ground zero.
We decided that have to come back for this one another day since my dad declared that "these are the kind of muggles that will mess with the cache if they see us"
So we got all of the numbers and put the coordinates together and we even know where the cache is but never did get to the cache today. Wandering the park was fun and interesting so it wasn't a total loss.
I love geocaching and could spend every day like this!
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