Day 45 - Missionaries to Dinner & Evening Walk

You may not know this, but Arizona gets hot in the summer. The locals like to escape the heat whenever they can. Fourth of July weekend gets pretty empty at church. At our church we take turns hosting the missionaries for dinner. Since we happened to be in town this week when no one else was, we decided to take a turn.

Having the missionaries over for dinner is great for the family. The kids get to see these young men who gave up a couple years of their life to teach people about Christ. They also always leave us with a message. Today it was about how we can be perfected in Christ.

The weather after the missionaries left was a cool 89 degrees. There was a nice breeze. We had to take advantage and go for an evening walk.

Day 23 - Geocaching on the Murrieta Creek Trail

Last Saturday was National Trails Day. They had a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new trail system here in Temecula called Murrieta Creek Trail. This is a totally paved trail (which is why we didn't do it last week). Today we wanted to use strollers so we decided to have a picnic, then try out a small portion of this trail.

The portion of the trail we walked was in full sun, not super scenic, and pretty full of trash (notice the shopping cart in the background of the picture above) BUT is was full of geocaches. We only walked 0.6 miles on the trail and were able to find 3 geocaches.

Can you see the tiny cache they're holding?

The geocaches we found today were all "micro" caches. They only had room for a small log. And they were tricky to find. We learn more with each geocache search. We are learning that our phone gets up in a pretty vague general area and we should invest in a handheld GPS. We are also learning tricky locations that geocaches could be placed. I thought they were always just up in trees or hidden under rocks. We are also learning the variety of containers that are used for geocaches. These tiny micro caches were all different from each other and totally different from our first cache, which was a huge, homemade black envelope. Kid one is really eager to place our own cache, but I want to see a few more first. Maybe when we get back to AZ...

Day 17 - Walking and Geocaching

If the weather is nice, we like to enjoy a Sunday evening stroll. There happened to be a geocache hidden in the park right by Grandma's house, so we today we combined our walk with a treasure hunt.

Unfortunately, we did not find the geocache today. It was supposedly an easy one and we searched all over with no luck. We were a little disappointed, but it was fun searching for it. And we did get to enjoy the nice weather this evening.

Earlier this summer there was a geocache hidden by our hike at "A" mountain. It was more rewarding actually finding the hidden treasure. The kids are more into it if they have a gps or phone to hold and follow. I was nervous handing the iPhone over but luckily it didn't get cracked today. I think next time I will bring the otter box case to give it a little more protection.

Have you ever been geocaching and do you have any tips for newbies like us?