It was a beautiful day here in NE Ohio. Mid 60's, warm sunshine, clear sky...my youngest boys, Devin is 3 1/2 and Bryce is 21 months, and I went into town to the park to play. As I was finally allowed to sit down and watch them run over and under the playground equipment, I remembered one cache I had saved in my handheld, which is always in my purse. It was described as a walk down a trail in the woods, no bushwhacking needed. Hmmm.
I couldn't take it anymore. Yes, my cache buddy was at school, but Colorado had given me a caching bug. I was dreaming about caches! I had everything I needed to find a cache and make a trade. I knew Devin would love a walk in the woods, it was Bryce that was holding me back. Like for 10 seconds! The stroller was in the van and if the path was like the ones I walked out in Colorado, it was be easy rolling.
So we climbed into the van and I turned Richard on. Devin thought my handheld, Ferdie, was a phone, but I told him it was like Richard, only, unlike Richard who stays in the van, Ferdie would be coming with us and telling us where to find the treasure chest. Devin was all for finding a treasure. Every time I looked back at him buckled in his car seat, he was staring at Richard's screen.
Unfortunately, Richard started blinking red at me. He was low on power and I hadn't put his power cord back in the van after my trip to CO. I talked nice to him and Dev kept telling me to get him some new batteries. To hush Devin up I dug out the tracking bug, or TB, I had found in a Colorado cache. He had seen it before and quickly took it. I explained to him how we were going to send him on an adventure by putting him inside a treasure chest we find and someone else would find him and put him in another box. Dev began making a shhhh sound while playing with the van and when I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was filling the van up with gas for his adventure. (Aww)Richard didn't shut down as we turned onto the road he directed us to, but, as before, he was brining me to the closest known road on his internal maps and this road was another cul de sac we couldn't begin our search from. I knew I was looking for a path between two baseball fields, so I left that dead end and continued on and around and found a park with tennis courts and at the back, baseball fields! We parked near the first one and headed past a sign that said this was a Health Path.
I glanced down at Ferdie for the first time since getting out of the van and to my surprise I saw another traditional cache icon that wasn't in my set line of travel. I looked this one up, and indeed there were two in this park! At the time I saved the caches to my hand held I knew that, but when looking for one that I could take a stroller to, I had skipped over it when I saw the other was off a path.
We were practically on top of this one. When I told Devin we were really close to a treasure chest, he said, Where? Where? and ran around looking for it, back and forth like a bee choosing which flower to pollinate first. I pushed B up to the border of grass next to a wooded area with rocks and logs and brought up the coordinates screen on Ferdie. A little back and forth walking and we found it underneath a piece of driftwood and between two good sized rocks. When I pulled it out, Devin looked at me and said, It's not a treasure chest. It's a treasure box! Yes, it indeed was a treasure box. We opened it and while he sorted through the contents and eventually decided on a Spongebob, I signed the log book.
Back at the stroller, I had no problem pushing it over the grass, but as the path turned into the woods it got a bit harder to manuever and then the path just kind of melted into the forest. I expected an outline of some sort, but there was none. I marked where I was as a waypoint so the boys and I could make it back out again, picked up Bryce and with Dev in tow, headed into the trees. We crossed a trickle of a stream and into an area that was being worked on by a heavy machine. There was a wide, deep track in the mud and many trees in front of us were cut down. There were also new flat marking sticks with pink plastic ties fluttering in the breeze. I couldn't remember what was said in the online log of this cache and hoped I'd find the hiding spot in this mess. 
Bryce didn't follow along all that well. He wanted to sit down and play with the leaves and sticks. I carried him until I was close to the coordinates and then put him down where he plopped on his padded bum to pick at some leaves. I was nearby what looked to me like a great hiding spot, but the coordinates didn't go that far. When Dev and I found the cache it was a bit off, buried under a piece of torn bark between two downed trees. Later when I logged my find the previous discoverer had said he found the cache out in the open, possibly pulled from it's hiding spot by the big machine. He hid it somewhere else nearby, so that explained why the coordinates were a bit off.
Like the box we found not too long before, Dev helped me pull it out and was eager to see what was inside. I was thrilled to discover a tracking bug and my first geocoin, which is another trackable item without a tag. From this cache Dev claimed a suction cup ball. 
Even though it seemed a long walk carrying one child and helping another, we hadn't really gone that far into the woods. We made it back to the stroller in just a few minutes and back inside the van. Bryce got mad when took him from the stroller and strapped him into the van. Not long after we left the dirt drive of the park, he was sound asleep.
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