park at the park

After our recent bout of quick stops Co thought it would be fun to go to a spot that required more hiking. So on April 14th we got the critters in the car, invited Justin, and headed out early to Point Au Roche state park. My only previous experiences with the park was going to the beach during the summer when I was younger, so we started there. We found out later that that wasn't the best choice.

Geo Cache 101
Not far from where we parked was our first cache of the day. This was one of the first times that we had done several caches on a series of trails and this cache in particular taught us a very valuable lesson. Stay on the trail until you know for sure that the only way to get to the caches is to start bushwacking! We spent about 15 minutes going through all sorts of fauna and later found that the path curved around not far from where the actual cache is. This was Zoey's first find. She ran right to where it was hidden and proudly shouted "Treasure!".

DownTheMiddle
Having never been on any of the trails in Point Au Roche park I didn't know what to expect after our first cache. The next stop was on the opposite side of the beach and I knew that were was a trail that headed that way so off we went. The park consists of several peninsulas and the next cache was toward the end of the first one. When we arrived at the GZ (Ground Zero) Colette and Justin snapped into action searching for the cache. Unfortunately Zoey wasn't able to find this one due to the fact that it was on the side of a hill, way too close to the water. Colette soon picked up the cache and we dropped off a monster and picked up some stickers. Zoey really wanted to play with them, but she would have to wait... there was more hiking and more caching to do!

Booty Point-less
Just north of the previous cache was our next stop. The trail we had to take to get to it was very cool. There were several spots that had worn away and we had to go across them one at a time. During the walk to the cache we found a large rock and took some pictures of Co and Zoey sitting on it. For the past couple of weeks Zoey has been determined to defy the good picture gods and look away or simply refuse to smile when we're trying to take pictures of her so it was nice to see that this one came out so well. Not too far from the large rock was the cache. This too was down the hill so Colette went down and retrieved it. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the cache was an older one and still in good condition. It had a great hiding spot which Co returned it to before we headed out.

Its a Moot Point
Our fourth and final cache of the morning was in an area far east of where we had originally started hiking. There are recreational trails that were donated by a family whose name I neglected to get. Now, of course, had we known that this are had it's own road access as well as a trail head and parking we would have parked here in the first place. Fortunately we can use that knowledge in the future when we return to get the other two caches we didn't get to. This was a quick and scenic trip on a well maintained set of trails. It didn't take Justin too long to find the cache so we could head back to the car. In total our trip was a little over four miles and we were quite tired when we got back to the car. We celebrated our day with ice cream from a local restaurant which was fantastic.