Where the heck are we?

Hey Everyone! Look what we have been up to last weekend! Another Boy Scout camping adventure! It has been a while since I have been to a Scout campout and this was a great weekend for it. The weather was great and the nights just perfect for sleeping outside. The theme of the camput out was the River Ridge Geo Quest. We were to use GPS units and compass' to find hidden waypoints in and amongst the trails of the Forest Glen Nature Preserve near Westville, IL. I found out about this about a month before hand and thought it might be a good excuse to get a GPS unit. I have been wanting one for a number of years and with gift money I recieved for my birthday, I went out and got a state of the art unit. I must say, these things are alot of fun! I played with it for about 2 weeks straight, trying to figure out how to use it, track my progress and find locations from afar. By the time I got to the camp, I felt ready to teach the boys how to use it and find where we needed to be.

Our goal was to participate in a number of GPS trail tests to find waypoints previously set by another GPS unit. The first was a timed event which had us running all over the place looking for markers with a set of numbers that we needed to write down and then add up later for accuracy. We came in 3rd place in this event. The big event had us walking about 7 miles all around the forst preserve looking for caches that held codes and other stuff (candy, swap items, etc..) that we needed to locate. There were 18 locations in all. We had only 5 hours to do this in so we needed to talk food and drink along with us. We started off, kind of slow, somewhat untrusting of the GPS unit, but after the third successful find we realized that it was working well for us and that if we followed the directions of the GPS rather than the trails, we could knock some time off by going off trail and moving directly in the direction of the waypoint. And boy did we go off trail. We blazed new trails that did not exist before and did a fair amount of climbing and jumping to get over obstacles and large hills and ravines. In the end we found 17 of the locations which was enough to get us 1st place in the competition and some nice prizes for our efforts! It was an exhausting hike and the chili we had back at camp was a welcome reward and we had no trouble getting to sleep that night! Over all, a great weekend and it has really sparked an interest in me for Geo-Cacheing. Check out http://www.geocache.com/ or google geo-cache to find out more about it!

As to the photos, (top to bottom, left to right...) The boys checking out one of the cache boxes that we found. This one had nothing in it, but you get the idea of what we were looking for.Veiw from the 150 foot fire watch tower at Forest Glen. The veiw was really spectacular! Julian and Dustin playing a game. (I always bring a game to camp... it is kind of expected now) and finally, the boys and I stopped off at the Pioneer Homestead cabin for a bit of a rest.

Go get a GPS unit! They are really cool and a lot of fun! And go outside and hike in the woods with it and have a blast! It is really worth it!

Later!