Geocaching is something we do to get us away from our computers and out into the local countryside. It's like a treasure hunt. Someone who lives around here takes a container, puts some trinkets in it, and hides it somewhere. They record the latitude and longitude of the hiding place and enter that on the geocaching website. Then people like us try to find it using our GPS equipment. If we find it, we can take one of the trinkets and/or leave a trinket of our own and sign the log book. Then we can go back to the website and prove that we found it because we tell what trinket we left there.

Fun stuff! But does it really get us away from our computers? First we spent an hour or so reading about all the caches in the Casa Grande area. Then we fed the GPS coordinates into Jim's laptop and the mapping software we have there - we'll use that to guide us on the drive there. Next we need the coordinates in the handheld GPS to guide us the last part of the journey where we walk. ooops, the handheld GPS wants the coordinates in degrees and minutes and the mapping software wants all decimal. Ok, wait a minute, there's a website here somewhere that will do the translation. Probably another hour gone by.

On the road. The description of the cache claimed to be 12 miles from Casa Grande. We got on highway 10 and headed toward Arizona City 5 miles away. I wonder, was the city named after the state? Or, was the state named after the city? Then we get on a local road and have 16 miles to the turnoff onto a dirt road. oooohhhh, I get it, the 12 miles stated in the description is 'as the crow flies'.

Getting out in the desert here really is beautiful.



But all the rain has turned the dirt roads into lakes. Our car has 4-wheel drive, but this looks like it might require amphibious capabilities. So we cut our adventure short.



Odie enjoyed a little run.



And we determined to come back when the desert has had a few more days to dry out.