The Hidden Treasures of Hiking

PB and I really like to hike while we're on vacation in Maine. Big Man and Little Man? Not so much. Actually, I take that back. It's not that they don't like hiking. It's just that they could do without it every day.

So PB and I, astute in the ways of parenting that we are, know that in order to be able to hike as a semi-happy family, we need to limit our treks to a few times a week.

Even so,  Big Man and Little Man don't always go gently into that good hike. Inevitably they begin the walk with a barrage of questions. How long is this hike? Can we stop for a minute, my mosquito bites are killing me! Dad, could you unzip the backpack and hand me my water bottle? Wait, I have to take a whiz.

Then, once they're all settled in, they move on to wearing us down by reciting, ad nauseum, lines from  Family Guy, South Park and all the Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler movies they've ever seen.

For yesterday's hike PB and I struck a deal with Big Man and Little Man. First we'd do a short little trek up and down Day Mountain.  Then we'd continue on to Hunters Beach so the boys could begin geocaching.

Oh? What's geocaching you might ask? It's the high-tech equivalent of a good old-fashioned treasure hunt. The attraction to Hunters Beach was that somewhere hidden along the trail to the ocean was a geocache --a water-proof container filled with a log book, pen and an assortment of trinkets that a fellow geocacher had placed there. Our mission? To find the cache using coordinates that Big Man had downloaded into his handy-dandy GPS device.

Parents, please take note: there's nothing, I mean NOTHING like an infusion of high-tech gadgetry to get a tween and teenage boy to forget that they're actually hiking.

Here's proof: Big Man enjoying the view from the top of Day Mountain before geocaching. NOT!

Notice his transformation during geocaching (Yes, he's smiling folks! He's actually smiling!)

But I digress. Here's how our treasure hunt unfolded. Big Man was the one who zeroed in on the exact spot (with a little help from PB). Then we all scoured the area peering under bushes, up trees, amidst rocks. Having never geocached before, I have to admit, I was beginning to wonder if this was all a wild goose chase when all of a sudden Little Man shouted, I found it!

And there it lay, just as the geocache site described it! An old ammunition can wedged between slabs of stone, partially covered by a rock. 

Little Man pulled it out, opened it up and everybody took a look inside. Among other treasures, there was a toy car, a plastic turtle and dinosaur and a shell. One of the fun things about geocaching is, if you add something to the cache, you can take something from it.

Little Man dropped our offering into the can.

In return we chose a stuffed Snoopy with a travelbug dog tag around his neck. In geocache lingo, this means Snoopy is a "geo hitchhiker," traveling from cache to cache, state to state, even country to country.  

Big Man recorded our transaction in the log book...

...then put the cache right back where we found it.

As for Snoopy...

He's about to embark on a long trip, to Rye, New York. 

As for PB and me, we asked Big Man and Little Man if we could please, OH PLEASE, go geocaching tomorrow. They said we could. If we were good.