I Blinked and May Disappeared....

Wow! May flew by! I didn't do anything really exciting, but it seemed like I was busy all the time. Work is busy as always and I seem to find something to tie up my time after work. I haven't forgotten on book reviews. I plan on posting a book review very soon.

Here are 2 noteworthy activities I've done lately-

At the beginning of May I won tickets to see 2 Door Cinema Club. Here's a few pics:

Opening Band - Leadspeak

Opening Band - The Emergency

2 Door Cinema Club

I tried a new hobby this weekend. It's called Geocaching. Basically it's a treasure hunt, but you use GPS to locate the "cache". People hide the caches all over the world and post the GPS coordinates to the Geocaching website for other adventure seekers to find. If you have an iPhone, there's a spiffy app you can download that almost makes the hunting idiot-proof. I say almost because, well, you'll see.

This Saturday was finally sunny in the greater Seattle area. I called up a friend to invite him to go Geocaching with me. After explaining what it was, he was game. We picked a park and I used my fancy Geocaching app on my iPhone to locate caches in the area. While there were a few caches in the area, there weren't any parking spots. Apparently everyone was out enjoying the sun. So we decided to try a larger park. We found a parking spot and I located a geocache within 300 feet of the parking spot. After walking around for a while trying to find a trail into the woods, which is where the app is indicating the cache is, we find we're getting farther and farther away from the hidden cache. So we back-tracked and headed in a new direction. After walking for awhile we found another trail, but it looked overgrown. We ignored it and continued on our way. Still not any closer to the cache, we head back to the car to drive to a different part of the park. We got out of the car near a petting zoo and started walking toward the cache, hoping to find a trail. A petting zoo employee noticed us wandering around aimlessly looking at my phone and asked us if we were looking for a trail. She told us to go back to where we were originally, because there was no entrance to the trails from the petting zoo. We told her what we were looking for and she told us that the rangers may have removed the cache because tons of people were walking around with GPS devises and the hider of the cache didn't have permission to leave a cache at the park. Great, now we just wasted all afternoon looking for a cache that may or may not be hidden.

As we were leaving, we passed the trail we ignored earlier. I mentioned we should try it and see if the cache was removed or not. So we park again and explore the trail. We soon find out the the trail is muddy and is slighly washed out in one spot. We carefully make our way around the washed out spot and continue on our way. A short while later, the trail gets very steep and is very muddy. I can't go on because I'm just wearing flip flops (unless I want to slide down the trail on my butt), so I recommend turning around and attemping to find another cache somewhere else. He wants to continue on, so he heads up the trail with my phone, leaving me by myself in the middle of the woods. Without my phone. He's gone 15 minutes. And he didn't locate the cache.

The trip wasn't a total fail. It was fun to go hiking on a beautiful day and it was good to learn how to use the Geocaching app. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures because I was so focused on finding the cache. Now that I know what to expect, I'll take more pictures and share my experiences on my blog.