"My Crazy Kids"

 By Allan Olson It was another awesome weekend to be outdoors – especially for doing yard work, hunting or geocaching. While we didn’t break any records geocaching this weekend, we certainly enjoyed a visit to two nearby new locations. After doing some yard work on Saturday morning, I made the kids clean their rooms and then I took a nice afternoon nap. Then it was time to go find a geocache. This cache was named Girl Scout Grub; it was located on the grounds of a former girl scout camp between Pennington and Cass Lake, or to be more precise, between Cass Lake and Schram Lake.  We had driven a mile off the main road and were starting to wonder how much farther we could drive when the end became apparent. We arrived at a location that must be used on a fairly regular basis; there were at least two separate fire areas – someone had stacked stones into circles to create fire rings, and there was a nice clearing for swimming. The water was shallow and warm, but...

A weekend in Duluth By Allan Olson Perhaps there is such a thing as too much fun, but still not enough. That’s the way I felt when we parted company with my cousin and his family last weekend after hiking and touring the big “city on a hill,” a.k.a. Duluth. We arrived at our destination at about 7 p.m. on Friday evening. Once the van was unloaded, our kids quickly immersed themselves in the other kid’s toys, and we adults began to relax. My cousin and I took off on foot shortly after we arrived to go find a geocache; he took me to the place where they found their first cache a little more than a year ago. From there, we trekked over to the UMD campus and attempted to find a cache located in the maze of the campus courtyard. The tall buildings impeded our GPS signal, and the looming darkness hampered our ability to conduct a thorough search of the grounds. Perhaps we will try another time – or, more likely, my cousin will find it before we visit again. We walked bac...

Out in the woods on a rainy day, just to find a geocache. We got wet – not soaked – but we had a fun time. By Allan Olson There really wasn’t much going on last week at our household. The four children all started school – hurray! the grocery bill will go down for a few months – and then it was the weekend, all in a blink of an eye. Saturday was a pretty boring day (at least I don’t remember anything exciting). I was exhausted after being out late Friday watching the Cass Lake-Bena Panther football team trounce their opponent in double overtime, and I think the thrill of that event wore me out. We went to a couple stores in Bemidji in the afternoon to do some “window shopping” and wound up picking up a few miscellaneous items before heading home again. If memory serves me correctly I even got in a nap after we returned home. Ah, a relaxing day. On Sunday I decided I wanted to go out and find a geocache, and there was about 10 miles away that was labeled...

By Allan Olson It was, by all accounts, a busy Labor Day weekend. It started on Friday morning – I didn’t take Friday off, but I did enjoy a leisurely Friday morning (well, sort of). So here’s the story of my Friday, August 30. I’ve had my eye on this geocache for about a year now, but I never got up the nerve to try it – mostly because it was going to be a mile walk (at least that’s what I figured) and then wading through chilly waters to an island just to retrieve a geocache. The last person to find it was over a year ago, and I met him at a recent geocaching party I attended with the children. I made up my mind on Thursday afternoon that on Friday I was going to go after that cache, and I wasn’t going to make up any excuses – I was going to do it. I decided that evening I would invite the neighbor’s oldest boy to go with, but due to the short notice he wasn’t able to (he had other plans). It was just going to be Nikolai and myself. Since I wasn’t really sure...