Mt. Carmel Cemetery

A little farther out Shady Grove road you come to an old abandoned cemetery. This one seems straight out of the movies. Lots of old trees among weathered stones. As you walk back, the stones become more and more worn. Then, there are just rocks, rocks that would not make you look twice except that they appear at regular intervals in neat rows.

Military Memorial

This cache was AWESOME! (awesome to be said in high singing voice for full effect). It involved finding a military memorial at our public library. We then had to go to two more memorials at the library as well.

We took pictures of them and had to use the writing to decode a series of letters and numbers given to us. For example A.1.1.1 meant the first memorial, 1st line, 1st word, 1st letter. Once we found all the letters we converted them to numbers using the alphabet (A=1, B=2...). We used the numbers in an equation to finally reveal the coordinates of the cache.

We returned to the library where the coordinates sent us across the street to the park. Down a slope into trees and leaves, the cache was finally located in a tree hollow behind some rocks. The cache was as AWESOME (again, sing for effect) as the hunt.

It was in a military box and inside were some military themed objects. The coolest part, though, was that the last person to find the cache was from Portugal and apparently a world traveler. He left stamps from all over the world (Thailand being the prettiest), and a geocoin (a type of tracker that moves from cache to cache and is tracked on the internet).

The geocoin was originally from Germany and has moved all the way to Parker County! There was another tracker, too, that is part of a military code game played with caches. Apparently you have to visit multiple caches all around Tarrant County collecting these little army men who have codes on them that will eventually be used to find the ultimate cache.

AWESOME! (you know what to do)

We are going to try to leave the geocoin in Oklahoma if we go soon. Otherwise it will have to stay in Texas.

Shady Grove

This was another of the caches in the cemetery series. This time we barely went any distance before the land was opening up. Again, beautiful rolling hills with lots of trees. Just the kind of land we hope to live on one day. Who knows, perhaps a cache will lead us to our future homestead.

This cemetery had a very different energy than the previous one. It reminded me of being in New Mexico. The grass was in tufts and parched. The dirt was sandy. There were but a few trees. The surrounding fence was like walking into the cattle pens my great grandparents had when I was a child.

This is a mostly abandoned graveyard, taken care of by the abandoned graveyard association in Parker County. It seems one lone soul was buried there in 2001, but otherwise the graves were from the early 1900's.

There was a newly built church beside it with a newly built playground. Noelle played on the slide for a long while. She even went down by herself a couple times, and it wasn't one of those little slides. She seems to be full of laughs and an absence of fear when she goes down. Hmmm...sounds like I have a few skipped heartbeats in the future.

The cache

The tree holding the cache

Baby's First Geocache

Stephen and I are returning to a forgotten but much loved hobby we used to enjoy together in Austin -- geocaching.

Except we are bringing along a new adventurer. A little wanderer. And we are going to keep track of it all on this blog, http://www.littlewanderers.blogspot.com/. There is a link at the side of the page, as well.

For those who don't know, geocaching is like a treasure hunt, except the prizes aren't coin but sweeping views, or hidden away groves, or swathes of land one might never see without the search for a cache. Basically, people hide little containers full of odds and ends. They record the coordinates of this treasure and post them here, http://www.geocache.com/, for people to enter into their own GPS. Then the hunt begins. It is always surprising and exciting to see where a cache brings you. It is the embodiment of immersing oneself in the journey, rather than the goal. And it is just darn fun.

Our first cache is part of a series bringing us to small, sometimes abandoned, cemeteries around Parker County. It wound us through the less affluent parts of Weatherford which eventually opened into rolling hills and large barb-wired patches of land.

This cemetery actually had more new graves than old. But it still had that peace that always seems to guard the resting places of those who have passed on.

The cache was hidden in the wooden post.