A Wild Goose Chase

Friday night Elisa and Alex came down from Ogden for what Matthew and I like to call a “married persons date”. To start off the evening we made some homemade bacon cheeseburgers. It was a new recipe that turned out wonderfully and while eating Elisa got on my laptop and got into Photo Booth. After a few minutes of coaxing, se got Alex to take some pictures with her. After the burgers and booth we planned on going geocaching. We had never tried this before, but it sounded like lots of fun. Alex picked out a few sites that seemed interesting and that were relatively close, we plugged the coordinates into Mandy (our GPS) and we were off!

We discovered many interesting sites as we began our hike to the first cache. First, we discovered that there was a concert at Red Butte Gardens and that if you want to hear the concert, but don’t have money, you can just hike up one of the many small hills right outside the gardens, set up a camping chair and enjoy the fresh air and somegood music! We all took mental note and Elisa and I enjoyed dancing to a few of the songs while Matthew and Alex looked embarrassed, because there were people watching. Our second discovery along the trail was a tarantula…

creepy little fella if you ask me, but Matthew and Alex got close enough to get a picture. As per usual, it is hard to see how big it really is because there is nothing to compare it to, but it is interesting looking anyway. The last thing we discovered on this first cache is that Matthew and Alex will try anything to make themselves look good…even take a picture of a box that isn’t a cache to say they found one! Let me explain this last one…

So we were walking along the road, headed towards the coordinates on the GPS when suddenly we found a fence in the way. Elisa and I determined that the cache was somewhere within this restricted area and decided that it was not worth trekking through the tarantula filled brush to “maybe, but probably not” find a cache, but that we should move on to cache #2 instead. Well the boys decided that they were up to the challenge, so as Elisa and I headed back towards the car, the boys ran into the brush.

About 5 to 10 minutes after Elisa and I got back to the car the boys arrived. I thought they got back way too fast to have found the cache, and was surprised when they said they had found it. Elisa and I asked to see a picture and sure enough they had a picture of a green looking box. We were disappointed in the box because we thought it would be more exciting and we wanted a picture of the boys with the log they signed (signing the log proves you found the cache). A few minutes later, the boys admitted that they indeed had not found the cache, but soon after wading through high brush realized that finding the cache was a lost cause.

Even after the let down of our first cache we were enthusiastically hopeful that we would find one. So we continued forward. The second cache was somewhere close to Rice Eccles Stadium and had to do with the Olympics, but alas, we did not find it. Instead we made another discovery, which we should have realized sooner, but nevertheless were too excited and in a sense jumped the gun. We soon realized that we in fact did not have the proper equipment…our GPS is not a handheld GPS, but a car GPS. We decided that one day we would make another go of geocaching, but for tonight, the only place Mandy could take us to was Cold Stone. Lucky for us we had a gift card and each of us got a scrumptious desert for free!

After Cold Stone we headed back to the apartment to play some card games. We stayed up so late that Alex and Elisa chose to sleep on our living room floor rather than chance falling asleep while driving back up to Ogden. All in all it was a wonderful evening filled with great food and a fun adventure!