Wednesday, August 28, 1013

This was another day to continue Hugo’s geocaching education. Our first and most important goal was to find the Mona Lisa cache. It is a puzzle cache that we had tried to solve before Hugo’s family had to return to France. We thought it would be a perfect cache to search for together since this painting is in the Louvre museum in Paris. However, we do not have a lot of experience with puzzle caches and Hugo’s family left. It took Cordell several more days before he found the answer that gave us the numbers we needed to put into our GPS so that we could find the location of Mona Lisa. After that it was easy to find it.

There was a little light rain falling on and off all day, but that did not stop us from looking for more caches. We found 9 new geocaches and Hugo found 12. Today, he has begun to find some caches before Cordell and I see them. I consider that he is now a very experienced geocacher.

 

The last one Hugo found today was a very, very difficult one. In fact, when Cordell and I first looked for it, we did not find it. We went back almost a year ago with our geocaching friend, Melli, who had not found it her first time either. But, she had been thinking a lot about this cache and she had an idea of where it might be hidden. We looked in that place and it still was not easy to see it. But we found it with Melli.

We stopped there and told Hugo that we were not going to give him any extra information. He had to find this one with no clues from us. He made a good search and I was surprised when he did go to the place where the cache is placed. But, he couldn’t find the cache. Then Cordell looked because he knew where we had found it previously and even Cordell could not find it. So, we concluded that the cache must be missing and we were very disappointed because this is a super cache and we wanted Hugo to find it.

We returned to our car and began to drive across the parking lot to a store where I wanted to buy a few items. As we were driving, Cordell mentioned that the place he looked had a rock in it. I then asked him if he tried to remove the rock and look behind it. He had not. He immediately turned the car around and we went back to look for this cache again. It was raining a bit more so I stayed in the car while they looked again. And this time, Hugo finally saw something strange and different and when he looked more closely he was able to pull out the cache!!

 

  After we finished eating our dinner tonight, we took Hugo to Happy Harbor Marina. In addition to being a place for boats to dock, it has a small restaurant. Every Wednesday night is “open mike” where anyone can come to play and sing Bluegrass Music. This music is traditionally played on acoustic stringed instruments and was inspired by the music of Appalachia. It has mixed roots in Scottish, Welsh, Irish and English. I grew up listening to this music in the mountains of south west Virginia and I thought Hugo might enjoy hearing it too.

So it has been another good day for us.