Geocaching Treasure Hunt

We had the wonderful opportunity to go to South Lake Tahoe for their annual Geocaching Treasure Hunt! It was so much fun :) If you're not familiar with this, what happens is each team (or individual) gets a code sheet that lists all the coordinates of the geocaches. They gave out 25 on Sat. and 25 on Sun. Then teams race off and start searching for the caches. Each cache has a log and a stamp. You are given a "bingo" sheet so you can stamp the ones you've found (stamps are all different so no one cheats). If you are the "first-to-find" you get a prize...things like a dinner for two, tickets to a show, a new GPS unit...We never got a first to find but when you are bringing 5 kids and a dog along, you can't expect much lol. At the end of the day on Sunday they held a meet and greet at the hotel where they also had a raffle. You got one raffle ticket for every stamp you collected (we ended up getting 9 all together). We didn't actually go to this because we were all pretty beat by then. Some of the teams were frantic going from one cache to the next which in my eyes seemed pretty stressful. Maybe if it was just me and Mark I would have been more competitive, but I thoroughly enjoyed taking it easy and sharing the adventure with the family and taking in the scenery.

This is the first cache we went to find...you can see that other teams were there as well. Even though you are all trying to find this little container without anyone else noticing, it was a fun social gathering for those of us who didn't care about winning :) Even Chip met some new doggie friends lol.


Here Mark and the girls are coming back after finding this cache (I stayed in the car with a napping Austin) They had to walk on some pretty unstable logs to get over the rushing stream, but there were no fatalities thank goodness ;) Isn't it beautiful? I love Lake Tahoe!
Kelsie was more interested in finding rocks than caches (do we expect anything else from her?) :)
And of course no prefect vacation is complete without the adventure of a flat tire! Mark did a great job changing out tires pretty quickly but even so, this pretty much ended our day. It was just about lunch time on Sunday so we decided to go have lunch at the lake and end our geocaching fun.
The kids and Chip had a wonderful time playing the the freezing water. Really it was so cold it hurt to put my feet in...I mean there is still snow on the mountains! We went to a beach on the Nevada side because that is really the only area that allows dogs on the beaches. So those are the California mountains you are seeing there.


Brooke making her sand castle...her favorite thing to do at the beach :)
This was defiantly Austins favorite part of the vacation because he wasn't strapped in the car or the carrier...he's one happy boy.
I really hope we are close enough to do this again next year...if not, I fully intend to create a smaller version for the family each summer :)