A Word About Geocaching Challenges

Geocaching Challenges are like dares. They're basically someone saying, "I bet you can't do this..." We have done any number of challenges in our geocaching lifetime, from finding caches that started with each of the letters of the alphabet to finding one every day for 410 days. The last one was easy since it came out after we were past 800 days in a row.

We have our own challenge out there. It's called "The Streak" and it is the cache you earn if you cache every day for a full year. You even get a poker chip with a little naked guy streaking on it. It's in very good taste, of course, this is a family sport.

Right now we are working on so many different challenges I can't keep track. We finished the Island County Thomas Brothers Guide challenge this weekend. That went with a minimum of trouble. We had to completely revamp our route when the ferry schedule ended up two hours behind. We drove around and did the route backwards. We still managed to complete the entire thing by early Sunday afternoon.

We had to hike to a couple of the caches and one of them we almost didn't find, but we managed to turn them all up and we had the final in hand by 1:30pm. So my husband suggested taking the ferry to Guemes Island to add another island to... you guessed it, another challenge called the Island Hopping challenge. We have to get 30 islands in Washington state to get that one. They're specific islands too, not just any islands or we'd have it in a flash, there are a lot of islands in Washington.

Then, since we had another day to spare, we spent Monday driving around the North Sound area getting caches in little towns for the Cities and Towns challenge. The owner of that challenge chose a long list of tiny towns all over Washington and to get the final you have to get a cache in every one of the little towns. We will be traveling a lot this summer trying to finish that one.

Doing all these challenges gave us miles on our little racer anyway. So far we have 500 miles on it and we're in second place! Of course, that's after the first weekend, it's a long summer.