Well, we had quite an eventful day yesterday. We took the canoe out to Lake Woodlands for a day of paddling, geocaching and fun. We got a whole lot of each. Tony and Allison came up for the day and we got to the lake pretty early. We put in at Northshore Park and seeing that all the grills were full, decided to go find one of the geocaches on our list and hope the grills were open later.



Here we are at our first stop. We paddled just over a half mile to get to the spot and after some brilliant (not really) moves like parking on the wrong bank, unloading, realizing the error, reloading, moving the right bank, and unloading again... we were on our way to the first cache. After some pretty rough searching, (between the 90+ temperature, brambles that ripped flesh from bone and constant fear of snakes) we found the cache.



This in on the trip back to the park. The sun is relentless at this point.



While in the middle of the lake, these ducks made their way over to us. At first they were a bit shy and standoffish, but when the we broke out some treats for them, they became much more friendly.



Back at the park, there were indeed several grills open by now. As you can see, the heat was giving me the "red face" and Tony was just glad to be in the shade and relaxing.



Allison and Pennie looked fine. They worked on the "slaving over a hot grill" thing. Okay, well maybe just Pennie did.



After an excellent lunch, Allison and I wandered off to a cache that was hidden just under 300 feet from the campsite. Here she is holding what is called a microcache. Most caches are larger so that you can find big treasure, these contain primarily just a small log book for you to write that you indeed found it. They are great fun to read sometimes.



We got the bright idea to check out the other end of the lake and paddled another mile in full sun. It took its toll on Tony who didn't drink enough water. There is a nice pagoda at the south end of the lake where we chilled for a while and recuperated from the taxing trip.



At the end of the day, all was well as everyone took a refreshing dip in the cool water. It was a really good ending to a really good day.
- posted by Chris @ 9:30 AM