Got the Goal (and some ticks too)

This past weekend was filled with geocaching fun. In my previous post I stated that I am not in competition with anyone. However, I am in competition with myself, continually trying to do better each time. One of the things I like to track is how many caches I can find in one day, with and without the family. On Saturday we set a new family high score of 14 finds in one day. Our previous high score was 12. One thing to note is that we don’t sacrifice fun for speed. If we find a cache at an interesting location we’ll take the time to enjoy it. After all, isn’t that one of the founding principles of geocaching?

A few weeks ago the family and I set a goal of reaching our 100th find and finding at least one geocache in Tennessee before the end of August. On August 8th we found number 100 and on Saturday we found not one, but two caches in Tennessee. Probably not a big deal for most. But we set a realistic and attainable goal and had fun doing it.

On the way to Tennessee we stopped at the Shoal Creek Preserve to find a few caches. This is where we got our first DNF for the day at “Wood Walk” (GCRDBA). From the parking area this cache was about 1/4 of a mile(straight line distance) into the woods. Here’s my log post for this one:

DNF – We looked for more than 30 minutes for this one and didn’t find it. However, the ticks did find us. We found several ticks on us during the walk back to the parking area. Then we found more during the rest of the afternoon. When we got home I did a thorough search of the boys for ticks. My oldest one was clean, but my 3-year-old had several tiny ticks on the inside of his legs and around his waist. I guess they were little baby ticks, I’m not sure. They probably liked the way he smelled. It took a while to get them off of him, and he was not happy when we were done. So even though we didn’t find the cache, we will remember this one for a long time. Next time we’ll bring the super duper bug & tick spray. TFTH.

We all found a several ticks crawling on us, but my 3-year-old is only one that got bitten. In addition to ticks, we got several chigger bites too. I think I may have gotten into some poison oak also.

We didn’t let this one incident spoil our fun for the day. We continued on and had a great afternoon of family geocaching.

Here are a few related links for proper tick removal:

Tick Tips at Center for Disease Control
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/ticktips2005/

Tick Removal at American Family Physician
http://www.aafp.org/afp/20020815/643.html

Tick Bites Instruction Sheet at Kid’s Health
http://www.kidshealth.org/PageManager.jsp?lic=1&article_set=36502&cat_id=20221