Geocaching and mowing

Sitting along Highway 64 north of Motley, it’s known by many unofficial names: the Ever-Changing Rock, the Painted Rock, or simply the Motley Rock. There’s a geocache hidden near it, and we took the opportunity to find it on Saturday on our way back from St. Cloud.

By Allan Olson

This past weekend was a blur, just like almost every other weekend. I spent Saturday morning at the LLTC graduation and from there, I buzzed back home and then a few of us took a quick road trip to St. Cloud. On the way back, we did manage to work in some geocaching.

The trip started out with plans for it to be just my wife, myself, Marcus and a friend. Alivia was getting dropped off at a friend’s house, but those plans fell through so she ended up tagging along as well. After we took care of our business in town, we made a quick stop at a big electronics store, but came away with only headphones for the children. Then we made a quick jaunt across the street to get a special coffee for me and before we set our course back to home. 

Once we got out of the traffic, my wife directed me to some geocaches and we introduced another person (Marcus’s friend) to geocaching. Call it beginner’s luck – he found the first cache we went after. In all, we only found five caches for the trip, which is a pretty small amount considering how many are in the area, but time was short and we needed to get home.

Sunday was spent informing children that their work needs to get done before they can have any fun, and after Abigail finally managed to get enough of her homework done, I agreed to take her to a friend’s place. Once she got the all clear, she buzzed around the house like a little bee, trying to find the things she was going to take along for her overnight visit. 

I made the drive into town, visited for a bit, grabbed a few things from the store, visited with someone else in the parking lot, and then finally headed home. At home, I put air in the mower tires, since Alivia had already put gas in it and was anxious to get mowing. Honestly, I think if she could, she would mow every day of the week, or find some other reason to drive the mower every day of the week anyway.

The mowing was going great until the blades tangled with an old leash of my niece’s dog left over from when they lived here. It took the better part of an hour for Nikolai and I – mostly Nikolai – to get that cable leash unwrapped from the spindle of the mower. I would estimate that Alivia did 90% of the mowing, I did 7%, and Marcus did the rest. There are some areas that still need a weed whip, but we have yet to get one to last more than one season, so that usually doesn’t get done. Other areas need to be done by the push mower, but I have yet to pull that beast out of the garage to see if it will even start.

What did not get used this weekend was the watercraft. I thought about taking the boat out on Sunday, but I didn’t get out of bed until almost ten, and then I needed to eat so I made pancakes for everyone, and then I needed to do some work so I did, and by the time the evening bite might have been going we were mowing and/or eating again, so it just didn’t happen.

As I said, the weekend was pretty busy, and so the watercraft will just have to sit a little longer before being used this season. I have a feeling it’s going to end up being more weekday evening uses this year than weekends, because so many of our weekends are already filling up. And that is also why we decided to take a family vacation this coming weekend, since we probably won’t get one in later this summer.

Our plans involve just a few hours of travel each way, and will combine hopefully something for everyone, including my wife and I, with ancestry and geocaching. The kids have no clue where we’re going, but I’m pretty sure they will have plenty to talk about next week. Here’s hoping the weather is nice, the roads are great and the fun is aplenty.