Getting Caught Up: January 2012 Happenings

January 2012 - Getting Ready for Camp / Dinosaur Valley State Park / Lake Tawokoni State Park / Geocaching

Getting Ready for Camp - Team Nelson has a goal. This summer the four of us are going to a special family camp in Colorado for an entire week. We have already put down the deposit and locked in our reservation. One of the big things at this camp is hiking, so Team Nelson now has a goal to get in shape to handle the hikes. We need endurance, especially since the Colorado mountain will be around 13,000 feet and thinner air.

Dinosaur Valley State Park - We chose DVSP as our very first foray into hiking because we figured that we needed something that X and A liked to entice them to explore. We saw dinosaur tracks and (which were not the most exciting since they were partially washed away and mostly underwater) and had a blast playing along the riverbed in the canyon. The kids enjoyed it immensely as did we. We returned home that night exhausted, realizing that we need to do this MUCH more and starting to think what we need for a more successful outing experience.

Lake Tawokoni State Park - For our next hiking adventure, we chose some place a little closer to home. We hiked the trails deep into the woods and peered at the lake shoreline from a distance. A loved to take a stick and make odd markings in the sand (like some sort of tracking symbols). At one point we actually used these symbols to retrace our steps. He thought it was great that we would find his marks.X loves to lead the way, but A also would run up occasionally. This was a pretty even pace for Melinda and I, but we did do a lot of "1-2-3, Stop!" to slow the kids down and started "follow the leader." Both kids enjoyed the extra little game of it.

Geocaching - Without going into all the details of what it is, we started geocaching as a family. See http://www.geocaching.com/ for a complete explanation. One of the sideline bonuses of going to the State Parks is that they all have geocaches located somewhere in them. Basically, geocaching is treasure hunting for known prizes (or usually sometimes just the mystery of it) all over the world. There are about 1.6 million registered geocaches around the world and anyone with a GPS-enabled device (like an iPhone or any GPS) can play. We have found three caches locally, signed the logs, took pictures and exchanged prizes on one. From now on, we are going to start looking for them at every State Park.