Officials are now calling the Covid-19 Corona virus a pandemic. Schools all over have shut down and parents all over are trying to cope with homeschooling. In this episode I talk about my attempt to combine home school with a bit of geocaching.
Places and Things Mentioned
– Veteran’s Tribute park
– Storybook Walk
Cache Highlight: “Belly Button”
Transcript
Welcome to geocache adventures with me, Shadowdragn1, where I talk about geocaching and my adventures with it.
With the corona virus, corvid-19, being an issue, my son’s school, like many others is closed until further notice. Like many other parents right now, I’m trying to balance working from home and providing schooling for my son. The school has not yet set up any sort of online alternative for the kids but I fortunately had practice books for addition, subtraction, and writing that we used already and his teacher had sent home some extra reading practice material when they first started talking about shutting down. I used some internet sources to help figure out some science and social studies work that was grade level appropriate and came up my own outline for a daily school routine. So now I’m working 4 hours in the morning, spending 4 or 5 hours with my son, and then working my last 4 hours in the evening. And during that 4 to 5 hours with him I’m trying to balance learning activities and spending quality time together.
So on our first day of this new routine, he wanted to have gym glass. I had decided on animal habitats for our first science lesson, so I thought why not combine science, gym, reading, and quality time together. The weather was a bit chilly but it was decent out so we grabbed his soccer ball and his football and we headed off to the park. We went to Veterans Tribute Park, the same one I mentioned in the last episode. Again I’ll have the link to the park’s website in the show notes There was a geocache there that we had previously logged as a did not find. There was parking close to the geocache but I decided to park at one of the further parking options and we used the long walk to talk about what animal habits were as well as look for some along the way and talk about what kinds of animals would live there. After that we went over the book walk for reading. For those not familiar with the storybook walk, the county library system in the area has partnered with some local parks to set up a sign post along different walking paths and at each post is a page to a children’s book. So you walk the trail and read the book and the book gets changed on a set schedule. There is a link in the show notes if you want to learn more about that. So after the book walk we went back to the car for the soccer ball and football for his gym class and after that we went and just played on the playground for a while.
Warning: This part of the show contains spoilers for the cache that is about to be discussed.
The cache was called “Belly Button”
Cache ID GC86E7Q
Difficulty rating 3.5, Terrain rating 2.5
The description read:
Fifth cache!
I’ll be placing constantly.
There is some tree climbing required to get to this one!
FTF Goes to nanonabber69!
C’mon… I want to see a fight for this one!
Once found, you can click the link for some other hides.
*Location has changed as of 3/2/2020*
Hint:
Belly Button or Backside?
Note: the hint was updated after the location was change.
I originally tried to find this cache with my son back in December 2019. The location led us to a large tree off the walking path a bit, on the edge of a grove of trees. But despite finding what seemed like the perfect spot based on the name and original hint given, a little hole near the base of the tree that looked like a belly button, we didn’t find anything. There was one DNF, did not find, logged at that point and we logged it as a DNF as well. I kept watch on the caches activity and over the course of a couple of months, 4 more DFNs were logged by other cachers. It seemed that the cache had been muggled. About 2 and half months after our initial DNF log, the owner of the cache posted that the cache had been moved to a new location. About two weeks after the cache had been relocated, my son and I went to the park to avenge our DNF and do some school stuff. The pin location led us to the same tree as before and with the new hit we found the cache on the back side of the tree. The cache was a small copper color bison tube nestled at the base of a hole in the tree that was fairly high up. I’m 5 foot 7 and I had to stand on my tip toes to reach it. My son was super excited. He kept jabbering on about how we didn’t find it before but we found it this time and he really liked watching the blue disappoint face turn into a yellow smiley face on the app.
With the geocache and all the other activities we did at the park, we spent about 2 hours there. Then it was back home so I could go back to working and he played with his hot wheels for a while. It’s a difficult time for a lot of people right now and there are certainly people in much difficult situations than my family and I are in currently. I’m just glad I was able to find some balance between trying to be his teacher and just being his mom and still being able to share something that we enjoy doing together.
Geocache Adventures 
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