Finally, a warm weekend!

Finally, a warm weekend!
It was a beautiful spring day on Saturday – perfect for attending an indoor geocaching event and later heading out after a geocache. We made our 615th find on this spot, and our geocaching partner Fargnot made his 14,098! This event was fun, and finding the cache was fun; overall, it was a fun weekend.


By Allan Olson
It was bound to happen sooner or later – the tide finally turned on Minnesota’s weather, and it is making some of our snow melt away. It actually is starting to feel like spring outside, and we gladly took advantage of the change.
Thankfully, things started off much better this weekend than the last; we learned that my wife’s uncle is making progress toward a recovery – something that has brought much excitement for the family. We are hoping he continues to mend.
After school on Friday, I took the kids to the library. Back at home, the kids were required to do some work – folding laundry, cleaning the living room, working on one of their bedrooms. They had started that project on Thursday and got it pretty much completed on Friday evening. After that, we pretty much lazed around and had some screen time.  Lately, I’ve gotten hooked on American Restoration and American Pickers, so when time allows, I’ve been catching up on some previous seasons.
Saturday was really fun. Last week my wife and I attended the first of a two-part geocaching event where we exchanged items that could be used or incorporated into a geocache. We had one week to complete the project, and the winner would be voted on at this week’s event. The kids and I went this time, leaving mom at home to enjoy some solitude.
We left early, allowing time to sneak in a geocache prior to the event. However, due to some poor navigation by yours truly and Nikolai, by the time we got to the cache area it was already time to head to the event. At the event, we enjoyed visiting, looking at the cool creations and enjoying some good food (potluck). The winner of the cool cache contest went to a Cass Lake local who came up with a very interesting creation; it will be great fun to see it in action.
Since I couldn’t find that cache before the event, I wanted to go looking for it again afterward, and someone else wanted to go along – after he found another cache he was unable to find the previous week. We teamed up to try and help him and his wife find it, but no help was necessary as he made the find.
Since I knew approximately where the other cache was at, I led the way. The kids jumped out of the car and headed toward where they figured it was. Marcus spotted a bottle and yelled, “Found it!” I was looking at my phone, perplexed that the coordinates were over 200 feet off from the location when the kids realized what they found was just a bottle that someone had “left behind.” So we all headed off in the direction of the coordinates, and soon were digging around in the snow and moving things, trying to find the cache. We had nearly given up when the “Phone a Friend” option was used by the other cacher with us; he called the owner of the cache for some advice.
I headed to a spot that I had checked previously – it was a log that I had stepped on and it didn’t budge. This time I was smart and pulled on the log and sure enough, there was the geocache. After lifting Abigail out of the knee-high snow and getting her boot freed, we all took a photo. Our geocaching friend wanted to know how all these kids went geocaching; well, he found out. We spread out helter-skelter, then converge on one spot, then move out again. There’s no rhyme or reason to it, but if we don’t let the kids wander and do their own thing once in a while, then it wouldn’t be fun for any of us.
Sunday was spent cleaning again. The kids spent most of the morning and afternoon outside. Abigail figured it was summer already and decided she wanted to go barefoot. I protested that decision and made her put her footwear back on.
The weather promises to be nice this week, and just maybe the snow will disappear and we will have an opportunity to find another geocache or two. We’ve talked about heading over to Grand Forks to visit my wife’s uncle who’s thankfully improving. Perhaps we’ll get to do both. I guess we’ll just wait and see!
Please be safe while fishing this season, and remember to take pictures to preserve a lifetime of memories. Also, please watch out for the buses that are transporting our children, and remember to drive  safely. Thanks for reading, and have a great week! For more of my columns visit: http://allan-crazykids.blogspot.com


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