This simple cache is to commemorate my ten years of geocaching, giving back to the geocommunity who has given me so much!
On 06/10/2020, I will have reached my tenth year of playing this silly game. To give some history to anyone who cares to know, in the summer of 2003, my husband explained this new game he had heard about to the family just prior to an extended road trip we referred to the "Technology Road Trip" because we had all sort of new fangled equipment with us to include a brand new digital camera, a laptop and a GPS. The kids were old enough to start playing with the GPS and understood it much better than I. We soon found our first geocache and I still remember the big smiles on the four kids as they came running out of the woods with hands full of goodies! We were hooked! We did a couple more that summer, though I really had no idea what we were doing or how we were doing it. Fast forward a year and my husband passed away. So did playing at geocaching... at least for awhile.
I spent a good many years trying to figure out who I was now that my kids were growing up and I was alone. Somehow I found myself taking a new look at geocaching. I did some research and found that my late husband had never actually created an account for us. Further, he had picked up a travelbug along the way and it resurfaced in the back of his car which made me feel like a terrible human being for still having it and never logging it!! I got myself an account, figured out how to play and how to use the GPS and eventually headed out on a road trip north. The first thing I did was find a cache and drop that TB I had been holding. That was June 11th 2010 somewhere around Cottonwood, Arizona. I headed further north from there and found myself enjoying the game and now logging even more caches for real this time. Chester the Dog eventually joined me and we did a great deal of road tripping and caching. But what I want to really explain is that geocaching brought me out of my funk from losing a husband, kept me busy, got me on the road and helped me heal. Over time I have seen some incredible places because of this "silly game" which I would never have found otherwise. I even introduced it to my new husband while we were dating and as luck would have it, he started to enjoy it too! We celebrated my 5000th find and his 500th at Mingo just last year. So thank you geocaching community for showing me some spectacular sights, helping me to heal and making me the kind of person who, when stopped for a minute at a fast food joint, grabs the phone to look for just one more cache!! See you all soon along the trail! Cache on!!