Geocaching in the Blue Hills

The old Joyce and Andrew are officially back, as in, we had time for our first geocaching adventure in over a year on Sunday!

The site of our hike was the lovely Blue Hills in Milton, literally within sight of Boston:

I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical of Andrew leading the way using the geocaching app on his iPhone - I was convinced that we were going to wander lost amongst the trees:

But soon we found ourselves on the scenic main trail, enjoying sights like a pair of ducks (for Koreans, a symbol of marriage):

Andrew's keen eyes spotted this deer to the side of the trail - it was the biggest deer I had seen up close and it stood still watching us for a long time:

Reflecting the peaceful nature setting, it was quiet enough to hear the little streams along the trail tumbling over the rocks (although I couldn't help but wonder how big these streams were before all the rain we experienced last week):

One part of the trail was impassable due to swampy conditions and lingering pools of water, but luckily, Andrew was able to pick up a trail that went around this patch and met up with the main trail we needed to be on:

The last 0.1 mile, we relied on the GPS to lead us off trail, over large clusters of boulders and through way too many scratchy bushes (I was praying that we wouldn't find any ticks or poison ivy along the way). When I spotted this in a rock crevice, I knew we had found our geocache!

In case you're wondering about the morbid theme, the creator of the geocache claimed that there were rumors that this site was an old Indian burial ground - Andrew and I were seriously doubting that but it did lend some mystique to the geocache listing. Inside was the standard logbook, along with random goodies other people had left before us, including geocoins and tags that are meant to travel from cache to cache. We signed our names and the date, and carefully placed the geocache back in place, ready for the next person to find it:

On the way back, we noticed fresh horseshoe prints (and droppings) on the trail and were lucky enough to see one pass us by:

It felt like it took longer, but the whole adventure took us around an hour and a half to do a 2.5 mile hike. I'm already looking forward to doing another one soon, as I can't think of a better way to enjoy nice weather and nature with the added fun of a scavenger hunt.