St. Croix Islands State Recreation Area

St. Croix Island State Recreation Area 

(not to be confused with St. Croix State Park farther up north)

Sometimes some shut eye is the perfect thing.

When we left Interstate State Park we headed down the road.  I wanted to stop at Franconia and see the statues; however, in the 10 minutes that drive takes – disaster happened and Marcus fell asleep.

This created a bit of a headache because the two other parks on the schedule for today were not very far away and leaving Marcus alone in the car was obviously NOT an option...

So instead I drove to the farther park, and we both napped.  Okay, so I really read and played Candy Crush on my phone, but the nap time was really important for him.

This was one of those moments when having two parents would have been a lot easier – however, since I was alone with him it does mean that I got to do the geocache when he woke up.  People did give me some funny looks in the car.

St. Croix Islands State Recreation Area is a very small place and it doesn't even had a website, so I don't have a lot of facts about it.  When you get there it just looks like a roadside historical marker rest stop with two small parking lots and a Port-A-Potty.  From the road you can't see that it is actually a pretty cool place to visit.

Once Marcus woke up we went in search of our first location.  We looked for a while and didn't seen anything obvious, so I looked at the website to see if there were any hints (SM Magnet)...  well, now that we knew what we were looking for it did not take long to find the Hide-A-Key with the next coordinates.  This was the FIRST time we have seen a Hide-A-Key used in a state park geocache – sneaky ranger (they are common in other geocaches).

Can you see it?

Close up

A closer view

We entered the coordinates and went off for the second location.  This park is a bit confusing because it sits on a cliff with warning signs everyone and a huge wire fence at the top of it.  Because of this we could not tell if the cache was going to be up or down.  We decided to head down first – we also wanted to see the river and that was at the bottom.  It was really flooded, but very pretty.  We tried to take a trail in the direction of the next geocache, but it did not look very safe, so it made me pretty sure that the cache was up on the top of the cliff, so we turned around.

We got some great pictures of the cliffs from the bottom.

We got back to the stairs and were back in search of the next location.

Marcus led the way – you can see the fence in almost all of the pictures because it ran the entire length of the park and the cliff.

When we got close we could see the final cache ammo box chained to a fence hiding behind a tree.

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It was at the top of a small hill.  Marcus wanted to climb the hill by himself... I kept offering to help and reached out a hand but his answer was always a firm, "NO!"...

That is until he figured out he could not get up it by himself... then "NO" became "MOM"...

 Once the hill was conquered Marcus found the final reward of his "bock bock" card.

Once that prize was gained he we headed back to the car.

Here was our card.