Caching in on BMPs

One of the best things about being self-employed is that I can pretty much schedule my own hours.  Plus, I work with my husband, so if I want to take a day off and play hookey, it's usually pretty easy to do unless the snow is flying.  Today is the last day of my sisters visit, so we took off to do a couple more caches since it was such a nice day.  The first one we did was called "Caching in on BMPs" and it was a 4 stage cache.  That mean we had to go to 4 different locations and find a cache container and figure out clues to the next stage.  This is part of the cache description from the cache page:

This geocache is sponsored by the Lake County, Illinois Stormwater Management Commission (SMC). The objective of this multi-cache is to find 4 different caches and learn about Best Management Practices (BMPs) along the way. Stormwater BMPs are acceptable practices designed to improve water quality by preventing or reducing stormwater runoff pollution, conserving water and recharging the aquifer.

We head out to stage one, which is at:

On our hike to the cache, we passed a few silo's and a cistern....

When we reached the cache site, this is what we found.  Can you guess where the cache was hidden?

If you guessed that it was hidden inside this birdhouse you were correct and you have what is known as "good geosense."

Inside the cache box was a clue and some co-ordinates for where we were to go next....

Stage 2 was at this little bridge over a creek and we had to locate the 2nd box with another set of clues...

Stage 3 was a hike thru the forest, a little over a mile round trip, where we had to go to this bridge and get some information off of the bridge tag...

Here is the cache at the final stage....

After that we went to the Lake County Office and we each received this coin as a keepsake.

It was a really nice morning, the sun was shining and temperatures climbed up to about 50 degrees, so it was a great way to spend some time with my family.  The whole 4 stage cache only  took us about an hour and a half to do, we learned all about BMP's and we got a collectible coin on top of it!