Our first find...

I first discovered geocaching while taking a look at the Arkansas State Park web site for Mt. Magazine State Park. I was looking at the list of things to do at the park when I saw something that said "geocaching".

I had never heard of this before and first thought that "geo" might have something to do with geology. There was a link on the page to Geocaching.com and I went and visited the site.

After learning about the sport I found it very interesting. I also thought that it was a sport or hobby that my wife and I could do together and with the kids at times too.

I shared the web site with my wife who also found it interesting.

I joined as a member of Geocaching.com on Monday, March 27th, 2007 and ordered a GPSr from Wal-Mart. A few days later I received my GPSr (Garmin eTrex Legend) in the mail.

My wife and I had both taken some time off of work in April to do some cleaning out of our outbuilding. The City of Paris has a clean up week in the Spring and the Fall where they will pick up items at the curb at no additional cost other than the normal trash pick up fee. We spent one full day getting the building cleaned out and on the second day (April 13th, 2006) with the kids in school and day care we decided to take off in search of our first find.

The closet cache listed on Geocaching.com at the time was Sunset From A Short Mountain (GCTXGW).

I loaded the GPSr with the coordinates to the closet cache as well as some others in the area and we headed off on our first geocaching adventure.

This first cache actually achieved a couple of milestones. My wife Denise (who goes by the handle ddkds) is afraid of heights and our first cache was located atop of Short Mountain.

We arrived at the top of the dirt road that leads to the top of Short Mountain and parked. We got out and began to let the GPSr point us in the direction of the cache. We looked for a while with no luck. My first thoughts was "Maybe this hobby isn't for us".

I decided to take a second look at the coordinates in my GPSr and found that for some reason they were not the same as those published on the web site listing for the cache. I then manually re-entered the correct coordinates and the search was on again.

In no time we had found our first cache. We were excited as we looked through the contents of the container and found the log book to sign. Denise decided to take a hand made bracelet that someone had left that also had a card with their Geocaching.com handle on it. She later put the bracelet in a scrapbook she gave me to record some of our first finds.

We spent some time taking photos from the scenic spot and then were off to find two other caches that day.

Denise took a photo of me holding the cache container and I have been using that photo for my avatar on many geocaching related sites including this one.

We have been caching ever since .....

paris1time