Jonathan Dickinson Morning Geocaching
I got out of work a little early a couple of days ago and Jeff and I went to Jonathan Dickinson State Park for a walk and some geocaching. Well, not long after we got on our way, the sun started to set.
We made it out to the river with enough time to realize we are no longer spry kiddos anymore (man, those monkey bars are rough on my shoulders now!), and then we found one geocache before heading back to get the official Florida State Parks geocache right before nightfall.
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Today, I headed out early to see if I could get in a bunch of geocaches and a good walk. One of the things I really love about JDP is that they let you have off-hours access to the park if you have a Florida State Parks annual pass. I set on my way after sleeping in this morning. My first geocache required solving a riddle to get the coordinates for the actual hide which was a little ways away from the starting point.
This month I have learned that there are a lot of different kinds of geocaches. It’s also a good time to mention the origin of geocaching here 🙂 Today is my first day picking something that is not a straightforward cache – pretty fun to work through the puzzles!
On my way to the calculated coordinates, I took a detour along the little lake that sits long the bike trail. When we are in a wet season, I don’t go this way because the trail is half flooded and I worry about getting eaten by an alligator – as it is today, you can see the breaks in the weeds where some big gators have probably crawled from the water across the path. Everything looked so pretty and calm this morning with brilliant blue skies on the water. No gators or snakes and no dancing lady orchids to be found.
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There were lots of beautiful flowers blooming everywhere – these purple flowers are particularly abundant.
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I’m pretty sure I found where the hide was supposed to be, but alas nothing was there – there wasn’t a logged find for close to a year, so I gave up and moved on.
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I caught a couple of caches on the way to the Camp Murphy bicycle course.
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The weather was perfect and the skies were vastly blue.
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I also saw lots of birds today: egrets, herons, hawks, cardinals, mocking birds, small warbler type birds, 4 different species of woodpecker, and then I saw this scrub jay, and thought, “Hunh, you look like a bluejay but not a blue jay.” I got to the end of the path and found this new park sign:
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I think my favorite cache was this one in a whiffle ball. Just because it is a clever way to trap a buffalo (the key ring doesn’t fit through the holes) and requires a little effort to work it out of the ball like a puzzle.
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Today I learned that there are little hidden trails all over the park that I would have never noticed if it weren’t for my GPS guiding me to these little rough paths. I say “rough” because I did get a little scratched up today- Jeff would NOT have been happy!
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The geocaching changes how I see a place – I get this new layer of knowledge, so I know of all of these hidden treasures that most people would never know was there. Just look at how many are in this little zone of JDSP!
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I had just turned to head into the longer 2-hour hike in the back loop when I got the text from work, “Gonna need you today.” So I turned off the Geocache app and headed back for the car and a shower.
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