Highland Park Geocaching.

Last weekend we went to Highland Park, Illinois which is right on the shores of Lake Michigan.  They recently completed a new section of a walking/bike trail along the lake front and I wanted to check it out.  There are a series of geocaches conveniently placed along the trail, so it was kind of hard for me to resist that type of temptation.....  you know, geocaching, hiking and the lake front - It's all good!!

You can't beat the views.....

See that breakwater wall in the distance?  Remember that for later!

We probably walked about 3 miles round trip and found several geocaches along the way.  One was hidden along this stairway to the beach....

It's hidden practically in plain sight but my lips are sealed...

Another one was cleverly hidden on this bridge that crosses a ravine....

Then we walked on some footpaths through a wild prairie....

...and we had to find these strange doors that were built into the ground.  Then we had to find the cache.  If that door would have opened up while I was sitting there I would have crapped my pants!

Another cache was hidden here.  We found it and then sat for awhile and enjoyed the view....

Believe me, it's there....

Next we headed down to the beach towards another cache....

This cache was hidden someplace along that breakwater wall.  That's the one from the earlier photo.

When we got to it, we had to decipher a puzzle using clues on this wall.  I am horrible at puzzle caches.  I was ready to march out along the wall, guessing it might be on the end, but the waves were pretty rough and Louie talked me out of it.  We decided to forego this cache and when we got home I emailed the cache owner and got a puzzle hint.  We'll go back another day and try solving this one again.

We walked the rest of the way back to our car by taking the beach route and picking up stones and sea glass....

We had one more cache to get and we drove over to this one.  It was hidden near this mural.  You can see Chablis standing in the bottom of the picture to get an idea of the size of it.

After we found the cache we climbed up the drain pipe and called it a day.  There's still about 8 more geocaches hidden along this trail, so we have to pick a day and go back for the rest of them...