Awkward and Amazing Adventures: Geocaching in Wyboring

An intimidating team of serious geocachers

While I was in Wyboring visiting the family, my mom left my dad and I on our own. Both of us possess strong impulse control, ambitious drive to accomplish things, and an overwhelming responsibility to be mature….HA just kidding. We are both big kids who like to take naps and mess around with ideas and experiment that most adults would have little to no interest in. I always enjoy hanging out with the dad but this time was more fun than usual because we had some projects to work on...important stuff like walking with grandpa, trespassing to take pictures of the remains of a little town called Bosler, drinking Sonic vanilla diet cokes, watching YouTube videos of stuff blowing up, and finding geocaches.

If you live in America and don’t know what geocaching, you need to ask St. Google about that right now. Also if you don’t know what it is then you are probably not middle-aged, middle-incomed, and middle-of-the-countried. It’s very popular with the white, 40 something, in the Midwest. In a nutshell, it’s a treasure hunt using latitude and longitude coordinates and when you find the “cache” you write your name on a list and then log it on the computer. Super fun!

I knew that my mom and dad participated in this activity because they fit the demographic and apparently it’s popular with my mom’s group of friends. So as we were sitting with Grandpa at the botanical gardens I asked my dad about his recent success. My dad was explaining exactly how it worked and pulled out his GPS (cause that’s what everyone needs to bring with them on a walk). He entered the location of the swing in the rose garden and said, “I bet there’s one around here somewhere, probably right here where we are sitting”. We finished our walk and then went back to the house to nap (walking takes a lot out of ya).

Later on, we entered the swing’s location into the geocaching website and there were several caches within a mile…there was even one that said; “Location: Here”. THERE WAS ONE RIGHT WHERE WE HAD BEEN SITTING AND TALKING ABOUT IT! So of course we had to go on a treasure hunt for this cache immediately! We wrote down the location of a few others in the area and my nephew helped decode the clues.

We went back to the botanical gardens right at the swing and looked high and low. We found a baby bunny who was cute as the day is long. We found a lot of leaves that had fallen because of the hail. We found trash. We found a lot of stares from other people walking in the garden. We found a headache from ramming my head into a metal pole when I was crawling on the wall. Eventually we found the small cache in the crack between the retaining wall and the swing structure (SPOILER). We wrote our names, “The Salamander Duo” and the date. We then congratulated ourselves on our wit, our ingenuity, and our stick-with-it-ness. Quickly we jumped in the car and headed towards the next location. For the rest of the day we roved around the greater Cheyenne area looked for caches by statues, lakes, historical markers, antique fire trucks, and thickets of thistles. We had found 4/5, but had to give up by the lake because of lack of preparedness on our part. All in all a good day.