Lunch Club and Night Caching

In our area we have a lot of geocacher socializing going on, especially in the warmer months.  Cachers put together a lunch event, usually at the forest preserves or an area restaurant.  They publish the event on the geocaching website and any cachers are welcome to show up.  They usually last only about 1 1/2 hr. and its just long enough to stop by, have a burger, catch up with old friends, maybe grab a cache or two, and then head back to work.

This last week some friends of mine decided to host a lunch event in their backyard.  They had about 40 cachers show up, including 2 who were in town from Germany, and 2 more visiting from Texas. 

Everybody donated $ 5.00 at the gate to help pay for the food and a good time was had by all!

Saturday night we decided to go on a night caching run.  Night caching always reminds me of being a kid because we are running around in the dark with flashlights.  We took off for the evening with our friends Tom and Mary with a specific cache in mind.  It's a 4 stage, multi cache out in the country where you have to drive to each stage, use your flashlight to find fire-tacks on trees and then locate the cache container nearby which will contain the clues to the next stage.  Unfortunately we didn't get off to a good start.  We found the first location and spent an hour searching in the dark for the first clue, which we could never find.  So after all that, we weren't able to advance to the 2nd stage and we had to abandon hopes of doing this cache.  We emailed the cache owner and it turns out the 1st stage may be missing, so we searched in vain.  It was very disappointing to say the least.  We were not about to go home with our tails between our legs, so we looked up some more caches from our cell phones and took off.

This one was down a path in the forest preserves so it wasn't too hard to get in and out.

I liked this old fashioned street clock.  And yes, that's the correct time.

 I loved this one as it was near a creek and this old log cabin.

 This one was in a park.

 This one was underneath an old bridge.  If he slid down the bank he would have ended up in the river.

And here we're crossing the bridge on our way back.

We ended up getting 8 caches and had 2 DNF (did not finds).  We got home at 3 am.  It's been a long time since we've done any night caching, but it was a beautiful, warm evening and just fun to be out with good friends.