And the adventure begins...

For Christmas, we gave my 17-year-old son a hand-held GPS. He likes to hunt and fish and the particular model that was picked out has both land and marine capabilities. We figured he would have fun with it. Little did we know...

Then a co-worker of mine asked if he would be going geocaching with it. I told him I had no clue what that was. He directed me to the Mecca of geocaching and a new obsession was born - not only for him, but for me.

We buckled down with the Garmin GPS76 instruction booklet to figure out what we were doing and picked out our first caches from the website.

On December 31 it was cloudy but not too cold. Jake and I decided to check out this whole concept and went after The Cliffs Cache. We parked and headed into the woods leading to the cliffs, GPS in hand. We scared some wild turkeys that ran ahead of us. It wasn't long before we had zeroed in on the general location and after a few minutes Jake found the cache.

It may seem silly to those who haven't done this. The cache is full of silly toys or trinkets. There isn't anything of value really. It's the search and discovery. It's honestly a thrill. Our hearts were pumping from the hike and from excitement.

We had forgotten to bring a trinket to exchange, so I had scrounged in my purse looking for something. All I could come up with were local pizza coupons, so that went into the plastic bag in the cache and we took a polished rock. We signed the logbook and Jake took a bunch of notes about the day and the surroundings in a special notebook he started especially for geocaching.

I have lived in this area for a long time and have known about the cliffs, but never visited. I probably still would never have visited if it hadn't been for this cache search.

Check out some photos from our adventure!

As we made our way back to the truck, we both agreed that we were hooked already and headed to our second cache of the day...