What do you do when it's hot??

The days that we spent in Lancaster County PA were the hottest days of the summer thus far. We were suppose to go and visit Gettysburg today, but neither Fred nor I wanted to spend the day outside walking in the sun on a 90 degree day. So instead we went on a little road trip. As I mentioned earlier, we are on a quest to geocache in all 50 states. For those of you who don't know what geocaching is, I will give you a short explanation.

Geocaching started in 2000 when then President Clinton de-militarized the GPS satellites, allowing us to utilize this technology in our cars and in hand held devices. When this happened some nerdy guys decided to see if they could find a box that one of their other nerdy friends had hidden in the woods. And thus geocaching was born: treasure hunting in the twenty-first century. The object of the game is to find containers (caches) that other people have hidden using the posted GPS coordinates. These containers can be as small as the eraser from a pencil to as large as a jumbo plastic tub. Inside the container is a log that you must sign when you find the container and if it's a big enough container there might be treasures to trade for (things like prizes kids might get in a happy meal, to coins, books or other interesting stuff).

We have found that this is a great way to see parts of the country that we might not normally see. In addition, we have learned some very interesting facts and history.

So on this hot Saturday afternoon, we traveled into West Virginia to cache in our 48th state. We drove to Harper's Ferry WV and saw some beautiful scenery along the way.

We've all heard of the Potomac River that flows past Washington DC, but did you know that it starts in the mountains somewhere around Harper's Ferry??
We didn't either, but this is one of the interesting things that we discovered while going to our geocache.

We found two caches in West Virginia. One was in a small park in a residential area of town off the beaten path. The other cache was a bit unusual. It was hidden in an old dilapidated building with an unusual creature inside!







As of today we have found 998 caches, we are planning on finding our 1000th cache once we get back to Homewood Illinois. We thought it would be nice to find a cache by the same person who's cache was our first one back in April of 2006.