Birthdays and Geocaching!

Mark: I have been geocaching for 5 years now and during that time I sort of stumbled onto my own personal tradition, Birthday Geocaching. I pick a day, typically the weekend before or after my birthday, and I just take off and go geocaching. Three years ago I took off and drove up the North Shore, then over to Ely to then finally to Alvin's Phone Line. Two years ago when I met Kris, my birthday geocaching trip was her first extended experience geocaching and she loved it, so now it continues as a annual event.  Kris:  One I look forward to every year :)


Mark: This year I was having a hard time decided where we wanted to go and then it dawned on me, why not run a race and then cache the rest of the day, but where and what race. It was Kris who came up with the best idea, why not run the Earth Day Half Marathon and cache around the St. Could area, but he best part of it was she suggested we run the race as a relay team, that way it would not be too much running, we would still have some energy for caching the rest of the day.


As you may have already read we had a great time running the half marathon relay and ironically at the finish line was Jam3s, one of our geocaching friends. After we changed out of our running gear we started to look for caches the find, since Jam3s was from the St. Cloud area I sent him a message asking for any recommendations, he had one, Pillar of the Community, which turned out to be quite the challenge.


All in all we found 20 caches, not a lot but we were not concentrating on numbers. We DNF's 4 I think, but that number might not be as high if the weather had been a little warmer. It was frustrating getting cold while looking for the caches. It's April......It should not be this cold, not to mention the snow that was on the ground when we got up this morning.


One other side note about birthday caching this year. The month of April has always been my busiest, (most caches found) month, birthday caching trips have helped. But there was one day of the month that I had never found a cache, April 16th. Convenient that my birthday trip fell on the 16th this year. ;)

Kris: I tried to do my best to video the experience so here ya go.....sorry it was a bit windy!!