Weekend Update

This weekend, we experienced our first bout of not-so-nice weather as a storm moved in, bringing some rain and lots of wind. We were on a playground at the beach on Friday evening as the weather approached, and it was beautiful to watch. Although you can't see them in this picture, there were plenty of surfers making use of the choppy sea.



While the sun still shone, we made use of playground time. Stephanie stayed snug as a bug in her new Kozy Carrier. It had just arrived that afternoon, and we are instant fans. The design kept the wind (and eventual rain before we made it to the car) off of her, and she stayed toasty warm right next to me where she likes it best.



She is our little koala.

Our desire to avoid the bad weather made for a strange weekend, and we didn't get up to much that was noteworthy on Saturday. Sunday morning, we decided to visit the Aquarium of Western Australia (AQWA). We are a bit spoiled with our aquarium adventures, but we did enjoy ourselves. It was fun to see the beautiful range of creatures that inhabit Australia's waters.




On Sunday afternoon, our friends invited us to join them as they went geocaching. Have you ever heard of this? We hadn't! They told us it was a treasure hunt of sorts, and it would be fun for the kids, so we went along without cheating and looking it up online. We did take a bit of teasing for not being worldly enough to have heard of geocaching, but you, dear readers, have an advantage over us in that I'm going to tell you all about it! Geocaching is indeed a treasure hunt using a hand-held GPS. There are caches hidden all over the world. You can look online to see if there are any near you, and off you go! When you find the cache, you can remove a treasure from the box and you must leave a different treasure behind for the next people. Each cache has a logbook to sign and date, and you can also log online. Our friends are experienced geocachers, so they had with them a Travel Bug. It looks a bit like a dog tag with a bug and number on it. When you find a Travel Bug, you use its number to look it up online and see where it has been. You deposit it as the treasure at your next cache, and on it goes. The original owner keeps a copy of the bug and can track it down online. It would be very interesting to see where your bug goes! There is also a geocoin system similar to this. The kids really had fun discovering the cache and its treasures. This really is a fun family/friends idea. If you have access to a GPS, why not give it a whirl? You might be surprised at what you find!