Happy Canada Day

–Sun­day July 1st Morn­ing–
Sun­day dawned over­cast and misty. While we waited on the house full of peo­ple (4 Cana­dian adult cousins, 2 Cana­dian kid cousins, 4 Amer­i­can adults and 2.5 Amer­i­can kids) to all get up, get some break­fast and chill until we could head down to the local park for the Canada Day fes­tiv­i­ties, Donna and I decided to go for a walk and get our first inter­na­tional cache. As soon as we men­tioned the word walk, there came a series of small voices, “Me too”, “Me too”, “Me too” & “Me too.” James and Mady and their 2 cousins, Laura and Anna, were com­ing with us.

We headed uphill first, so that the way back would be all down­hill. There were about 5 caches within a mile of the house, but mostly the kids were more inter­ested in being kids, so we headed for a park where they could blow off steam. Donna and I pushed swings, spun merry-go-rounds, teetered tot­ters and made sure no one won­dered off. Finally the rain and wet pants con­vinced the kids to head back home, but we walked right past it. There was another small park in sight just down and across the street from the house. More play­ing and what­not ensued.

We didn’t mind this detour at all because this park also held a geo­cache. I headed off, GPSr in hand to look for it with James and Laura. Laura spot­ted the camoed lock-n-lock first behind a fence post. Laura grabbed a hockey trad­ing card and James took noth­ing. We had acci­den­tally left behind at home all the SC State Park schwag we had col­lected to drop in the caches out west, so I dropped in a cou­ple of Amer­i­can quar­ters for trade. And as I was explain­ing the whole trad­ing thing, take some­thing, leave some­thing, she put the card back and picked up the 2 quar­ters. Oh, well, they’ll catch on later.

In the photo above, from left to right: James, Laura, Mor­ris the Moose (the RCMP mas­cot), Anna, Mor­ris’ handler(who makes sure he just eats bear kib­ble, not lit­tle kids), Maddy and lastly, some ran­dom passerby.