Geocaching in West Bend

What do you do while you're waiting two days for your 50th Grade school reunion to happen?  When you're Peter and Renee Skiba you geocache!

We traveled to Milwaukee the second week in August to attend Peter's Grade School Reunion.  Having graduated in 1961 from St. John Kanty meant that you lived in very close proximity to about 60 other children during many of your formative years.  We learned together, we played together, we went to church together year after year.  We formed relationships that have lasted decades.  But the event was not going to happen until Saturday evening.

Since we had time on our hands we decided to participate in the 4th Annual West Bend Geocache Bash starting in Regner Park.  Geocaching is a world wide phenomenon wherein cachers seeks out hidden treasures using a Global Positioning System (GPS) device to guide them to the location of the cache.  We registered at noon on Friday with our caching handle, Pixelmagic, and learned that we were to be among a total of about 1600 teams participating in the event.  66 new caches were published specifically for this event in and around the greater West Bend area. 

Friday afternoon we headed to the northernmost caches and followed roads, trails and paths to get to the caches.  A sports themed series through the woods led us along buggy, shaded, hot trails to find a baseball cache at the end of a long branch propped against a tree and a basketball cache high in a tree trunk complete with hoop and net.  The themes and placement were well thought out and funny.  We met Dan and Vicki at registration and caught up with them in the woods.  It took some serious walking and hiking to complete 30 caches in the afternoon.

Saturday we were back in the rainy West Bend area attempting to get our share of the caches along with several hundreds more walking along the paved and not so paved trails.  We had a blast in West Bend.  Thanks for the cache.