Gathering Day 7: Northstar!
We actually set a start time for the day instead of just letting everyone get up whenever because we had big plans for Northstar Day! After grilling everyone as to what they found most exciting, we decided on hiking and geocaching! Geocaching means using a GPS to find things hidden in the woods. I had seen on Alex and Alli’s blog that they did this in New York, and it seemed like such fun! We picked up the gps and our hiking passes in the store at the base camp. The kids had SO much fun in there, you would think we’d taken them to Disneyland. The store had big red cubes in all sorts of different arrangements, and mirrors, and curtains. It was too cute. I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to get them out of there!
We rode the gondolas up to the top. Well, those of us with munchkins did, the rest rode the lifts. It was a little freaky when the lift stopped for a moment, probably someone needed extra time to get off the lift. Anyway, the kids loved the lift. We played a crazy game of I Spy, and I told Serenity we were riding up the mountain just like Curious George does in her book.
We headed off on our hike. The first little way was a bit crazy as the bike path and the hiking path start in the same place. Mountain bikers are a little bit insane I think. We missed the #4 cache at first, but we did find it on our way back! So we started with the #5 cache. Gavin and David climbed over rocks like monkeys and mountain goats respectively, and were the first to find the cache. It was pretty well hidden in the rocks, stored in a green army box. We took a marble, and left behind some of Andrew’s super cool chainmail. We decided that we were leaving much cooler things than we found in the box =)
After we got that cache, we decided the kids would probably be getting too tired to go all the way to the top, so we split up. Jennie, Gavin, Joyce, David and I went up to lookout point to find cache #6, and the rest of the group took the kids down for ice cream and naps. They did find the #4 cache on the way though! At the bottom they let the kids play in this sandbox thing, and Aidan discovered tetherball. He is already an impressive athlete, and Eric was so excited when he told me how after just a few minutes he was hitting the tetherball back and forth to himself using both hands! Eric and Jack played a bean bag toss with some help from the kids. Aidan and Serenity surrounded Juan and kept stealing his ice cream very patiently =)
The top of the trail was really beautiful! Joyce found the cache, and we took a pretty purple ribbon out, which she tied to David’s backpack. After rest and grapes, we hiked back down, stopping to find the #4 cache too. We found chain mail in it, which surprised us since we didn’t know the other group had found it. We though someone had taken our chainmail from #5 and left it in #4.
After we got to the base camp, Joyce David and Gavin went on a little hike to find caches #1 through #3, and Jennie and I made jewelry! It was so much fun, I’m so glad Jennie wanted to play with me =) We both had a hard time deciding what we wanted, there were so many pretty things! I ended up with an aqua and white necklace, and she made a purple/dusty pink one.
