North by northwest - a caching adventure - Part 1

We decided that this Labor Day weekend we'd spend it continuing to make progress on the Ohio 88 county challenge rather than hanging around the house, cooking out and the usual holiday weekend things.  Our target for the weekend was western and northwestern Ohio.  The official Geocaching site has a promotion called The 7 Souvenirs of August trying to get cachers to try some of the various different types of caches including virtual, mystery, puzzle, Earthcaches, and event caches.  We've done many of these over the years but never an event cache. Sounded like a fun challenge for a great caching run

Here's a picture of 4 sets of feet on the oldest concrete street. It was getting late so we decided to skip ahead to Lima and crash for the night.  The next day we started with a quick cache in a local park that was located in a rubber snake in the woods.  From the logs it seems many were a bit surprised to see the snake. We then backtracked a bit to Wapokenta, OH to visit the Neil Armstrong Air and Space museum.  It's a nice place and has some neat space artifacts including a rock from the moon. It's always cools to see space stuff in my opinion.  :)  They had a quick park and grab cache on the museum as well so another county down!

We then headed west to Mercer country and Celina for a multi-cache in the library.  This was one of the cooller caches we've done and really commend the staff for it. They had a very cool mineral collection on display as well. We talked with the cache owner and let them know how much we liked it, too.  By this time it was lunch and we'd already done 3 counties!  Kudos to Mercer county library!

We fueled up and hit the road north to keep caching on our way to Toledo. The next cache was in Van Wert and was a puzzle cache.  We rolled by the Van Wert county fair on the way to cache location and Max made the quick pick and grab. We then headed to the next cache which was a well hidden cache in a pile of rocks in a ditch.  This should have been a quick find but we really struggled to find it as the camouflage was pretty good. I eventually spotted it and we made our way to the next county, Defiance.

Emerson spotted the cache in the woods of a nice park by the river and we had some time so stopped for ice cream at a local soft serve place.  It was a hot, humid August day so ice cream hit the spot. We went to mass at St. Mary's which was a beautiful church. We were pretty grubby and hope we didn't stink or anything. :)  It was the second fastest mass we've ever attended with the fastest being in Times Square of NYC.  We took stock of the kids' attitude and decided we would pus for three more counties and wrap up the western side of Ohio. 

We found one in a small park and let the kids play for a few minutes before loading back into the van to truck on. The next cache was in a cemetery and a quick pick and grab.  We were in the home stretch and the last one for the day was in a park with an "awesome" play set so the kids had a great time.

We made our way to the hotel and hit the sack hard.  The next day was slated to be a long one so we wanted to get plenty of sleep.  Geocaching is hard, tiring work.  We'll save that adventure for the next blog.

We knocked out the following counties today - Allen, Auglaize, Mercer, Van Wert, Paulding, Defiance, Henry, Williams and Fulton.