Poison Ivy and Other Toxic Plants

Before Amanda left we wanted to show her what Geocaching is all about. I loaded up the coordinates in the GPS and typed up an info sheet as taught by Rake.

This trip would take us down to some parks in Anderson near the lake on a pretty day. Amanda had never been geocaching but roughly knew what to do from reading this blog.

One of our first ones of the day was my favorite one. There was a hole in the trunk of a tree that you had to fish the cache out of. Using a stick and swishing it around the little hole, sunlight reflected off of a wire. At the end of the wire was a capsule. There was a family having a picnic nearby, so the kids and Amanda blocked the view while I grabbed this one.

A few caches later, and Amanda found her first cache. It was buried in some rocks at the bottom of a STEEP hill.

Cari and Amanda were excited to be near the mall to find this one. . .

It was a miracle that the kids and I prevented the girls from actually getting INTO the mall.

Before dinner, we wanted to find one last cache. It was in the woods and there was no trail. Amanda and I decided to tackle this one by ourselves. As we stomped through the brush, Amanda kept pointing at various plants asking if it was poison ivy. Some of it was, some of it wasn't. I was holding the GPS as we created our own path through the thick woods. We were moving pretty quick until we came up on a small creek. The problem was the creek was fifteen feet down a steep hill from where we stood. If we went down, we wouldn't be coming back the same way. We were still making a plan, and by "we" I mean "I", when Amanda jumped down and caught her fall by grabbing a tree.

She was standing in enough poison ivy she could have made a salad. I stood at the top not wanting to jump. With her down there, I was forced to follow. At the bottom there was a flat area of wet sand near the creek. In the sand we saw human footprints. In the prints, you could see the outline of toes. WHO WOULD WALK AROUND HERE WITHOUT SHOES ON? We were five to ten minutes in a wooded area with no trails. At that point, we decided to abandon the cache and exit the woods immediately. We climbed the opposite bank from where we had jumped and saw a road. We got to the road and followed it back to the parking lot.

As we walked along the road, Amanda was scratching her arm and it made me think of all the poison vines we were pushing through. "So how do you like Geocaching?", I asked her.

She smiled and said, "It's fun."