A long day's journey!

I mapquested the trip we took today and it came to 407 miles – according to Mapquest this was expected to take 8 hours and 34 minutes.  In actual time- including geocaches were were out an back in around 11 hours.  So it was a long but good day.

One of the interesting things so far is the shear variety of the geocaches and how they are set up.  At first I was thinking – after visiting Fort Snelling – that they were all going to be really easy and fast.  We have now experienced enough variety to know that the rangers had a bit of fun in planning some of the locations.  Today we really saw that variety – we had one geocache that almost took an hour with hiking and three more that we did in 2 hours including long drive times! 

Here is our route: (actually we drove through Morris after going up Hwy 75 a short ways and then driving east [the only thing not on the map]; we actually drove through the U of M Morris campus very quickly when we went through town (Marcus's first campus tour!))

Here are the points:

     A/G= Home

     B= Big Stone State Park

     C= Glacial Lakes State Park

     D= Monson Lake State Park

     E= Sibley State Parke

     F= Greenleaf Lake State Recreation Area

So, as usual, there were some things learned from the day.  Although – to pat myself on the back – we do seem to get a bit better at this each week.

1.  Pack a lunch and more snacks.  I thought I brought plenty but we still ran out and Marcus ate EVERY LAST treat I brought near the end of the journey.

2.  We need to find our camera so that we don't have to rely on the IPhone as much.  It just takes too much battery life.

3.  Need to update the toys that are packed in the car-  Marcus did great but got a little bored.

4.  Bring the scope or binoculars for the future so we can see a few more details at the parks.

Overall this day was a success and a lot of fun!  What a great way to spend the day as a family!