Geocaching Day 3

Yesterday morning, Mae and I went on another geocaching adventure at Discovery Hills! Well one reason why we decided to go geocaching again this week was because on Wednesday, we didn't get to write down our name on the logs of the geocaches we found that day since we didn't bring a pen with us. So yesterday we brought extra pens and returned to the 2 geocaches we found Wednesday to log in our names. Along the way, we decided to stop by another 2 geocaches that we were nearby.

The first geocache we looked for was the one we failed to find on Wednesday. We successfully found that cache yesterday! Mae brought her glasses this time so she was actually able to see lol and she was the one who found this geocache! I was the one who found the first 4 geocaches we've found, so Mae was pretty excited to find this 5th one. The name of this geocache was called Double Peak Tiki Warrior.

We decided to find one more which was NE of the east end of Discovery Lake towards the neighborhood. This one was called Disco Pad and it was pretty out in the open by the neighborhood where a lot of people were walking nearby. We probably looked pretty suspicious because one guy came up to us and asked what we were up to lol. Mae also found this geocache!

Geocaching Day 2

Mae and I went geocaching again this morning. It was kind of an impromptu thing though. I checked out the new route...well maybe not new since we've taken this route before. So I guess a DIFFERENT route than we've been taking the past few weeks. Anyways, I checked the geocaching app along our route for geocaches and saw a few along our route! We searched for 3 and found 2! We couldn't find the first geocache along a particular new trail we veered off onto so we decided to continue on that trail and search for the harder geocache. 

This one was called The Hidden Mickey's. It was a fairly moderate hike down, hence the terrain rating. 

When we got to the area, we tried pushing away the dead brush with sticks and couldn't find anything. There were a lot of big loose rocks around too so after maybe 10 minutes of searching the area, I said out of frustration...and Mae says this was verbatim, "I'm just gonna start flipping rocks, it's gotta be here somewhere! Maybe it's under these rocks..." I flipped maybe 2 rocks over then I flipped over a rock that was on top of a big pile of rocks and there you go...there was the geocache! Literally right underneath the rock I pushed over! Later on during our trek back to our main trail, Mae mentioned that the point when I started moving all the rocks was when I "started to seem like a crazy person" since I was just shoving a bunch of big rocks away haha. 

This was probably the best reaction from finding a geocache from Mae and I out of all the geocaches we've found so far. When you find a geocache, you're supposed to be discreet about it and not really draw attention to yourself so non-geocachers don't go investigating and end up tampering with the container. Instead, we reacted in a way that is the exact opposite haha. There was a TON of screaming and laughing and OMGing about the stupid rocks. I told Mae that I really wish we had a video camera to record our reactions when we find these geocaches because we get so excited it's ridiculous. I just hope people around us didn't think our screaming was a result of us getting mauled by a mountain lion or something because we were pretty loud lol. 

We decided we would come back to this geocache tomorrow again because 1, the pen inside wasn't working so we couldn't write our names on the log book. And 2, there were a lot of treasures in this geocache and we wanted to leave something before we took something out. 

Here's our excitement after finding the geocache. 

After bringing our excitement level down by maybe only 5% lol, we made our way back to our normal trail and walked down the hill towards Discovery Lake. I remembered seeing a geocache pin on my geocaching app near the end of the lake so I suggested we look for it. 

This geocache was located at the east end of The Discovery Lake trail. 

We weren't sure how big the container was supposed to be since the bars that show the size of the container were all X'd out. But we kept searching nonetheless. We spotted a pink cup kind of thrown into a dead bush but I didn't think it would be that obvious. It seems that we always find something that we think could be the geocache but it's always just trash lol. 

Then we spotted something that just looked like a toy. I wanted to check it out since you never know, a geocache can be something as obvious as a Tupperware like the ones we've been finding or it could be something camouflaged like a fake acorn. 

So I picked it up and unscrewed it and saw the geocache log inside! The container was so tiny though that it couldn't fit a pen and we didn't think to bring one since we hadn't planned on geocaching today, so we couldn't log our names on it. We figured we'd just go back tomorrow to this one and the other one we found so we can properly write our names down on the logs and leave some pens/pencils for other geocachers. 

It's a tiny house geocache! 

Until next my next adventure! 💜

Discovery Hills Geocaching

For the past week, one of my best friends (Mae) and I have been trying to get back into shape. We usually go for a walk along the neighborhood trails near Discovery Lake, one my favorite places in San Marcos, then we finish off with some bodyweight exercises and stretching. I wanted to mix it up a little so I suggested we go geocaching. I tried going geocaching a couple years ago with 2 of my other best friends but we were unsuccessful that time and I never went geocaching again...until today!

I downloaded an app on my phone called Geosphere which is totally awesome! You can look up nearby caches and it has a built in GPS so you can navigate to your desired cache. You must have a geocaching.com account (which is free by the way) to use the app. I believe I paid $7.99 for the app but I think it's well worth it, especially if you're an avid geocacher or plan on becoming one! If you  have no idea what geocaching is....it's kind of like a real life treasure hunt! Containers, or "geocaches/caches", are hidden and inside are little treasures you can take and/or you can leave a treasure of your own. Each cache also contains a notebook where you can log the date and your geocaching name after you've found that cache. There are other fun rules, etc. with geocaching but for now I'll just leave you with the most basic description of geocaching.

So I checked the map to see if there were any caches near Discovery Lake and I saw that there were 4 caches right along the route we walk! So today we attempted to search for 3 of the caches and we found 2 of them!

The first cache we searched for required us to "go off the beaten path" and walk through a mountain biking trail instead of the normal walking trail you would assume you'd have to take to find the cache. When we got to the designated coordinates of the cache, we searched for probably 5 minutes and I found the container! You have no idea how excited we were to find it. Technically it was an easy find (1 out of 5 difficulty lol) but it was really exciting considering it was our first find. We left a few little things in the container, signed our name, took a few pics, then placed the container back where we found it.


Found the geocache!

We headed back to the main trail then made our way to the next cache. We followed the arrow on the app to the next cache's coordinates, looked around in the brush but couldn't find anything. Since Mae was wearing shorts and a tube top, she wasn't quite dressed enough to rustle through the brush and trees with me so she waited on the main trail. We were talking as I was looking and apparently a lady who was walking past Mae got scared and thought Mae was talking to herself since she didn't see me hiding in the trees haha. After unsuccessful searching, we decided to go to cache #3 then come back for this cache later.

Cache #3 was extremely frustrating. We couldn't find this cache at first either so we decided to keep on walking after maybe 10-15 minutes of looking. We walked to the end of our route then looped back to cache #3 again. We followed the hints and all the directions previous geocachers wrote about this app and still no cache! We probably spent about 30 minutes total trying to find this cache but no luck! We will definitely revisit this cache, possibly with another person...maybe they can find what we couldn't.

On our way back we came by cache #2 again and followed the hints which we failed to do last time. We looked in a different spot and what do you know, we found the cache! We didn't take any treasures out of this one either but we did leave a few things of our own.

I apologize for my lack of make-up...particularly my lack of eyebrows lol. 

Mae was very enthusiastic lol.

After this point we were already sweating our butts off so we decided to end our workout here and walk back to our cars. We spent 2 hours on this little scavenger hunt but we had a blast doing it! We plan on going geocaching maybe once a week, possibly with more people. Until next time!