Back to King's Point Landing

We erased a couple of Did Not Find (DNF)s today. One was Kings Point Landing. There was some talk on the website about the cache being muggled - then someone posted that the original cache was found partially buried. Who knows. But we went back today and found it in short order. Signed the log, and changed the status to TFTC. Whoohoo!

We also went back to Park N Grab on Stubbs, another one of our DNFs. And another quick grab. It's funny how we missed these before.

Earlier in the day, we'd gone up to the small town of Corcoran and scored 4 caches in a small city park there. As you can see from the aerial photo, the top and bottom caches are very close to houses in the neighborhood. We use the plastic-bag-picking-up-trash as cover. Hope we weren't seen. (Click on Photo to enlarge.)

A Hard Walk Around the Neighborhood

We spent the entire day on one geocache! A Hard Walk Around the Neighborhood was a brutal one for us.

Listed as a ten-stage multi-cache, it should have been about three miles of walking. For us, it was eight miles. The idea of a multi-cache is to figure the second stage from clues at the first stage. Then find the fourth stage from clues on the third, and so on. The trail was through a neighborhood in Minnetonka, Minnesota - starting at the boat launch at Gray's Bay on Lake Minnetonka. (See photo above.)

Some of the clues were things like how many sliding boards are in the park, or how many reflectors were on a sign. But we had to backtrack because one of the downward-slanting bumpy things in the park was not a sliding board, and again because some of the reflectors have been broken and damaged since the cache started.

Anyway, we got to Purgatory Park where the final stage (the cache) was located. We walked way out of our way. Knowing something had to be wrong we walked way back and re-calculated the final stage. By the grace of God, we were delivered from Purgatory and were only 114 feet from the cache. We waded through the blackthorn and Bob's yer uncle, there it was. Anyone attempting this cache had better take their lunch along.

After it was all over, it was worth the walk. We logged three travel bugs in the cache and three geocoins. I now weigh 10 pounds less.

Our First Benchmark

We started something new today - finding benchmarks. Our first was the Mound water tower. But it appears that the original tower, whose finial was the benchmark, has been replaced by a new water tower. You can see the difference between the two in the photos.



So then we found a real benchmark. It is mounted on the corner of an old building in Excelsior, MN. Although finding benchmarks is not geocaching, the find is just as fun.