Another First

Last weekend was a beautiful spring weekend and the last before baseball started.  We took advantage of a free Saturday to explore the area by geocaching.  Our first geocache in Italy!  We found parking and munched on a light lunch at a "playground."  Really, it was only a small merry-go-round and an itty-bitty slide--not a playground by American standards for sure.  However, behind us was the sound of the rushing water from the springs, beside us were stunning mountain views, and the kids found plenty of thrills on the merry-go-round, so no one complained.

We started at a mountain spring in Gorgazzo.  It's a lovely little spot, with a restaurant where we got some ice cream pops for the kids, took some pictures and enjoyed the views before we started searching. 



Isn't that blue water beautiful?  And of course, the girl!



I was pretty sure that hearing Cory scream "I found it!" from the nearby woods was not the best way to keep the whole geocaching game from "muggles," but kids will be kids, and ours can rarely contain their excitement upon finding the cache. 

After logging our find in the journal, we headed along the mountain highway towards another little village with more water and another cache.  We loved walking around the trail here, and since the kids were a little hot they enjoyed the cold spring waters on their faces and necks. 

The search for this cache was not as successful.  It seemed as though the clue might have lost something in translation--I'm just not quite sure what it meant.  Something about even ostriches flying.  I bet it makes perfect sense as an Italian idiom, but not in English.  In addition to the difficult clue, there were enough snakes hiding in the wall crevices that we Ted became a little leery about searching too hard for the cache.  Clue and snake problems aside, this was a beautiful place to spend a picture perfect day.