3 August 2004 North Chagrin Giant's Bench Cache

I started this blog with the plan of posting events chronologically. Two weeks ago my hard drive crashed. While I was frantically trying to recover my images, I found photos from our first cache find. I didn't remember taking them and had no idea they existed so something really great came from the crashed drive.

I bought Ali a gps in 2002 for off trail hiking at Pinancles in California. She's a map fiend so this seemed like a great extension of that hobby. It was two years later before I saw an article in a Pennsylvaina paper describing geocaching. This cache was very close to our home in the North Chagrin Reservation of Cleveland Metroparks. We actually visited the cache on July 29, but our log is for August 3rd. It only took one cache in the woods for me to be hooked. I think Ali was rolling her eyes at this point. We always make a point to travel around each year to find the Cleveland Metroparks caches. we had a lot of fun on a nice evening walk to this cache. Little did we know at the time how much geocaching would enrich our lives.

10 November 2005 #600 The Historic and Scenic Chippewa Walking Tour

For my birthday we were very near a milestone cache. I wanted to find Eric Sherwood's last Cleveland Metropark cache, and this evening seemed like a great time for the find. It was a little different way to spend a birthday, but I had a great time and we grabbed a few really nice caches in the area. At the time, this may have been the toughest non-night cache that we had completed after dark. Tha cache is archived now.

4 November 2005 #550 A Walk Down Millionaire's Row

Eric Sherwood was a friend, to us and just about everyone else who knew him. We finished this milestone during a walking tour of a virtual cache around his hometown of Warren, Ohio. The picture is filled with many of our friends and Eric's friends. As a group, we walked his vitual cache in Warren as a tribute to him at the end of his funeral services. He died too young and left a vacuum. Cache well friend; we'll see you around the bend.

17 October 2005 #500 Minister Creek Boiler Cache

We met Grandpa and Grandma in the early fall of this year. They were having a hard time finding our toughest hide ever. We offered to meet them at the cache and got to know these two wonderful people. We've had the opportunity to cache the Tanbark and Kane with them.

This was their cache and our 500th find. It is a really challenging cache that sees few visitors because of the difficulty. It is well worth the effort and a great memory for us.

15 October 2005 First Annual Kane Cachers Picnic

This may have been the first and only Kane Cachers Picnic, but it was a lot of fun. We got a chance to meet more people who have become our friends. We met kickin' and kachekat at this event. Little did we know that kachekat was actually related to a cacher in Northeast Ohio who would also become a great friend. We spent time caching with Ali's Mom, Grandpa and Grandma, Tprints, MommyTP, Joelmart, Wendy and their kids. At the end we celebrated Ali's birthday.

1 October 2005 Kiawa's Halloween Comes Twice This Year

This was the second big caching event we attended. We had been to a few coffee nights in the Cleveland area and a Cleveland Metroparks event, but this was the first large event where we met a bunch of cachers who would become close friends. We already knew Grandpa and Grandma. Many of our other friends somehow ended up in this picture in a silly variety of costumes, Geauga Garmin, dbczarina, Pirate & Crafty, Tprints, Snoop, and 3Beans had all dressed up to attend this event.

We really enjoyed this event and looked forward to attending many more of Kiawa's events. Too bad her health took a turn for the worse, and she has almost vanished from caching. This was about the point where we knew we had become hooked on caching.

16 September 2005 #400 Crafty View of the Grand

I used to fish very near here many years ago. The Grand River is a glorious place to visit. This park is very near an urban area and has ball fields and playground stuff. We had just found Number 400 at our friend Zoisrus' cache when we stopped by the skateboark park to grab a locationless find.

16 July 2005 FTF Tanbark Button Cache

Our friends kcepenn had placed two new caches on the Tanbark Trail during the week before we got to PA. The cache closest to the parking area was found quickly, but this one stayed unfound for a little while. We got to our home on Saturday and decided to head out for these caches. The trail was filled with blueberries. We hiked out and found this cache just before the rain began. On the way back from the cache, Ali walked ahead as I stopped to grab blueberries every few feet. At one point a huge tree fell during the storm. It was a fun, wet afternoon at one of our favorite places.

29 May 2005 #150 - Tanbark Rocks

We hiked this trail before we bought our second home in the area. It has always been a favorite place for us. Tanbrak Trail is a long trail with may different looks, from a really tough uphill push to a gentle walk through towering hemlocks to fields of wild blueberries. For us, the existence of geocaches on the trail just made a good thing better. Our friends kcepenn have placed almost all the caches on this wonderful trail. On the day we found this cache, we saw wild azealas in bloom on top of the rocks near this cache.

20 September 2004 Whiteoak Canyon Shenandoah

When we started geocaching in August 2004, Ali wasn't very excited by the game. We found a few sporadic caches starting with a Cleveland Metroparks cache, but weren't very active. We went to Shenandoah in September and I was determined to find some caches. Little did I know that National Parks did not allow cache containers so our only chance for a find were two virtuals. There had been two hurricanes prior to our arrival so the streams were raging. It took us two stream crossings and over ten miles of hiking a loop to come up with the virtual at Whiteoak Canyon. Yes, we crossed the stream in the picture. This is a picture I took very near the virtual location.

Hello

I am planning to use this blog as a place to post milestone photos and other memories of geoching for us. We have placed these photos on the geocaching.com page before, but we continue to bump up agianst their page size limits. I hope this will be a better memory.