A perfect geocaching day

We got up this morning to chill and fog...35 degrees and dew across everything...this soon burned off, and we decided to go geocaching. I loaded a bunch of new geocaches into my GPS and we head out. We started in Lake Placid, at a micro-cache in town, conveniently located near Starbucks...yes, we have a Starbucks!!! (everyone else in the world is bored with them, but we're a bit excited)



We posed for this one with the cache in lap, and Main Street stretching out behind us...



Our next stop was another quicky out on Averyville Road, at an old one-room schoolhouse...



After the old schoolhouse, we headed off to a more serious hike along the shore of Lake Placid along the Peninsula Trail...here, Gail and Ben are taking a break on a rough-hewn log bench...



The trail has lots of informative signage about the wildlife to be found all around us while in these woods...



Here Ben can be seen begging Mom for delivery from more learning...



We stopped on another bench for a break to enjoy the lake-view...



Ben and I built a Fairy-house along the trail, and used some scavenged bark for walls and roof...this piece had a 2.5 inch slug crawling along it...



Once we found the cache, traded, and logged our visits, we posed for the family shot...this is one of numerous pictures taken, as my super-tripod didn't make it into my bag today...Ben was playing with it, so I was doing the balancing act, which resulted in some odd shots...



After the 3rd cache of the day, we stopped for lunch at Tail O' the Pup, a barbecue place in Raybrook, and had a nice meal...Ben really got into corn on the cob for the first time...eating both mine and an extra that I ended up getting for him...



Our 4th geocache of the day was an even longer hike along the trail to Scarface Mountain...and we found this bear scat near the trailhead...no bear sightings though...



We found lots of stripped pine cones, and a couple of full ones, which we broke open so that Ben could see the seeds that the squirrels are after...a bit like the corn he enjoyed for lunch...



The trail crosses beautiful Ray's Brook...



There is a great system of bridges and boardwalks the cross the brook and associated swamp, built and maintained by work-crews from the nearby prison...



Ben loved the boardwalks...



Ben and Mommy after finding the geocache...



Ben was pretty tired after this geocache, and rode most of the way back on my shoulders, and we started, but did not finish a 5th geocache...we'll get that one tomorrow...



Ben finds the carseat in the Element even more comfortable after a long day of geocaching...This was a great day of blue skies and cool breezes, no bugs and lots of hand-holding, cool things to see and fun stuff to do...geocaching helped get us out of the house again!!!