An Amazing Weekend

An Amazing Weekend

By Allan Olson

The weekend lived up to its expectations and perhaps a bit more – it was amazing.

Friday evening, nearly Saturday in terms of time, my cousin arrived with his wife and two children for the weekend of geocaching and we stayed up way past my bedtime until the early hours of Saturday morning visiting.

Saturday morning was spent mainly lounging around the house while the kids spent time terrorizing the house. That afternoon I took my cousin on a geocaching run at some nearby caches within 10 miles of my house. Of course since the cell service was poor we relied on my memory to find most of them since we had already logged all of those.

That evening was spent relaxing and gorging ourselves on a large meal topped with dessert and a relaxing beverage and we retired several hours early compared to the previous night.

Sunday morning after breakfast it was time to pack the kids, the vans along with sandwiches and snacks for the day of geocaching.

We made our first find at the Deer River water tower. I was searching for it and accidentally found knocking the magnetic box to the ground with my arm – sweet I got the first and ultimately my only find of the day.

The next couple of stops were at various boat ramps or parks or campgrounds on our way to the Taconite Trail off the Scenic Highway north east of Deer River. The majority of the caches were fairly simple with none of them taking a terrible amount of time or energy exerted to finding them.

Our next stop before the Taconite Trail was at Wabana Creek ski trails at that site there was three geocaches that we wanted to attempt. The first was a multi-cache (more than one stage with the first giving you directions to the cache) and since we looked and looked and couldn’t even find the directions we were unable to make that find. My cousin and I decided to head down the trail with the five of the six kids to look for the other two and after reading the last log entry we knew it was going to be a little challenging.

Okay so maybe the first mistake was tackling the trail after reading the most previous log entry, we headed into the woods and found a log to step over, and then a couple logs and then it was smooth sailing (sort of) at least for a while. The second mistake might’ve been in our reading of the GPS map we decided to take a trail but then realized it was the wrong trail and had to double back and continue on the first trail. Of course we’re blaming the equipment and the dense woods, blocking an accurate signal.

The third mistake was not turning around when we got back to that main trail instead we continued further along the trail stepping or climbing around or over a log or two and trying to keep the kids on task as three of them insisted on taking the “Road Less Traveled” right through the thickest part of the pile of logs. “It’s more fun,” Marcus and Cael kept telling us of course the other six year old was the other problem – Abigail. She didn’t try to go under she wanted to go over and scale all of the logs and travel the length of it until she felt like getting off, often on the thinnest branches. I didn’t even bother counting the number of times she fell – although she never complained once.

Then we found the real obstacle course – on steroids. It was multiple trees laid down flat with multiple branches to climb over – since Abigail was already trying to climb them I decided to go her way – again it was another mistake from standing on the trees I could see it was more of the same up ahead and again instead of turning around we continued on. I climbed the length of the tree with Abigail and we plowed our way through a bramble of branches to the opening in between the next blow down. Once the others were through the tangle I decided to forge ahead a little further and I could see was more trees down and at least another 500 feet to ground zero. My cousin and I decided that if we were going to find any other caches that day we had better get moving back to the vans. At one point in that part of the journey I decided to show the kids that I could scale a log as well by jumping over it and that would’ve been the biggest mistake of the day – but thankfully I saved myself from a “soprano” ending and decided that I had better not attempt that again.

The next stop found us on the Taconite Trail for a walk in the woods. The first stop was a geocache sitting on a very light weight deer stand with a skeleton next to it – the cache was appropriately named “Under the Weather,” it was a most interesting find and my boys enjoyed it and wanted to climb the stand but it was too fragile for even them.

The trail system continued to amaze us as we found our most interesting geocaches of all in our four months of caching. The caches we found were “Man of Steel,” Superman flying in the air with guide wires, “You’re the one,” which was a Rubber Ducky reminiscent of the Sesame Street days, “Hooked on Geocaching” which was a hook on a retractable dog leash 20 + feet in the air, with a giant bobber at the top, and “Traveling Nest Egg,” which was an Easter bunny with wheels and a basket and we found a few others as well.

The trail itself was also a challenge in the dense and rolling terrain and in certain spots of the trail we lost cell service which made it a little harder to find some of the caches. Ultimately we found all but one of the caches we actually searched for that day. We had to abandon our search for that cache due to the approaching late hour and with two of the three cell phones dead and the third not far behind.

It was another great weekend to enjoy the outdoors and without going on a geocaching run it’s unlikely we would’ve ever seen this beautiful country, enjoyed that much fresh air and all that exercise.

We returned home about 7:30 that evening and ran kids through a meal and a shower and put them to bed. This geocaching dad went to bed early himself with a couple of muscle relaxers to ease the pain he knew his legs would be feeling the next day.

It was truly an amazingly fun weekend and I can’t wait until we get to do it again.

Please be safe on the lakes – wear your life jacket, keep the kids safe, and remember to take a picture to preserve a lifetime of memories. School has started – so please watch out for those buses that are transporting our precious cargo.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week! For more of my columns visit: http://allan-crazykids.blogspot.com.