Becky and Jared's Blog
Becky, Jared and Sarah
Horsing Around and Testudines
Jul 12th
Today we went to my Dad’s house for dinner. While I was downstairs, I noticed some travel bugs that he’s collected. (He still has one that he took from a cache in May… that’s a pretty big no-no. Nicia, make sure Kathy has them before she goes on her trip to drop off Emily.) Then I decided I wanted to geocaching! (Yeah… I’m starting to get addicted) So I got the website, found out my location using my iPhone and entered that in and found some cache’s nearby. One was called “Horsing Around with Cool Hot Not.” It was a cache that my dad and Nicia created. I made sure that they didn’t tell us where it was. Justin and Stephanie had never gone geocaching before, so we decided they should tag along with us. So they patiently went with us. It took a lot of self control to keep myself from running down the street like a little kid in search for my cache. Once we got there, Justin asked how we were supposed to find it and what we were looking for. I told him it was just a plastic container. Well…credit goes to Justin for finding this cache. (Beginners luck…)
Then we decided we wanted to find one more cache so we walked over by this pond by Spring Creek park. This one was called “Testudines” after the turtles that live in the pond. We got to where the GPS coordinates told us and couldn’t find anything. We called Kathy for a hint and she said it was under a rock. After 7-10 minutes of looking for it, Becky yells over that she found it. Check out the cute little container it was in.
Okay, so it’s hard to tell, but it was a plastic turtle and it was hidden under a rock. So yeah… We’ve found 3 caches in 2 days. I think I know what we’re going to do on our occasional days off more often… GEOCACHE!
Let the Geocaching Begin!
Jul 11th
So if you pay pretty good attention to our past blogs, you know that about a year ago, we went to California to visit Nicia, Joe and Alyssa when we went to get our car from Katie. If you remember, Nicia took us geocaching for a few caches. (Hey Nicia, if you remember the names of those caches and can let us know so we can add those to our list of finds, that’d be pretty cool. But since you’re such an avid cacher I won’t be surprised if you forgot them all.) Well, I was looking at Nicia’s webpage the other day and noticed she added a widget showing how many caches they’ve found and such. That piqued my interest in geocaching around here in Utah. Since there’s so many mountains and such, I’m sure there are a bunch of people who geocache. So I registered for a geocaching.com account and downloaded MotionX GPS for our iPhone (it was on sale, I didn’t pay $10 or else I would have bought the Groundspeak App) and started loading in GPS waypoints. Well, one of them ended up being right across the street from our work at Five Diamond. It’s called the Orem Stormwater #1. It’s maintained by the City of Orem Stormwater division. They said they put bags of information about Orem’s stormwater system free for the taking. Our first attempt was right after a shift a few days ago. It was starting to get darker and we couldn’t find it. That and I don’t think we were quite in the mindset to find caches. Then today we decided to go to work just a few minutes early and try during the day. The problem was that we were looking on the ground for it and under rocks and such. Well, it was a big ammo box up in a tree! (See, I wasn’t in the right geocaching mindset yet)
We found a travel bug and a geocoin in it, but we only took the travel bug.
(For you “muggles,” those things are considered “trackable” items. You can go to the geocaching website and enter a serial number and find out where it’s been.) Here’s a map of where this travel bug has been.
It’s trying to get to Seattle by 2007… ooops. Hasn’t really moved that much. It was released in 2005 and has only gotten to Utah. But as you can see from the map, it made a HUGE jump from Georgia to Utah in one trip. We’re planning on taking it to Washington the first week of August when we go to the Tri-Cities. We already have a geocache picked out by the Pasco airport to deposit it into. So at least it’ll make it to the state it was trying to get to. So so far, that’s our first geocache trip! I’m sure we’ll go on plenty more geocaching trips, but hopefully they won’t have crazy long stories like this one had.
Try to find the cache in the picture below. Believe me, it’s there. And that picture was taken after I had replaced it and made it even easier to find for the next people!
Family Fun at Liberty Land!
Jul 8th
Wednesday was our day off of work. Since Katie was in town, we hung out with her in the afternoon and went out to lunch to Tucanos (thanks Katie!!). While we were there, we found out the bad news that Utah Lake was too windy to do any enjoyable boating, and also Deer Creek was too windy as well. So we decided we (Justin’s family, David’s family, Katie and us) that we wanted to do something fun along the lines of Trafalga or Boondocks. We had decided on Boondocks, but then Joyce came up with the idea of this new place she had coupons for called Liberty Land in south Lehi. So we went to Liberty Land, which was way more fun than we first thought it would be. At first glance, it looked like they had a few small rides, a go kart track that wasn’t that big, they did have a roller coaster, but bumper boats that didn’t work 100% of the time. We found out they had a $10 Super Unlimited after 6 on Monday and Wednesdays, but they let us use the coupons for 2 for 1 super unlimited passes, so most of us got that. Liberty Land was WAY more fun with all the little kids! They had this huge inflatable slide that the kids loved going down (and as you can tell, so did I…).
Then we ventured out to do some more of the bigger rides. Brooke and I got Becky soaked on the bumper boats. Then I rode on the roller coaster with Ryan (who seemed like he had a good time, but didn’t want to go on it twice). Then things start getting fuzzy on the exact time and order we went on rides. But anyway, Nathan and I raced on the go-karts. Even though the attendant gave him a huge head start, I still won. Oh yeah.
Then we went rock climbing. My hands were really sore, so I only climbed the easy one. After that one was done, I couldn’t grip hard enough to climb more. But Nathan and Hailey, on the other hand, climbed everything a few times.
Then after that, we decided we wanted to go Laser Tagging. Oooohhhhh man…. THAT was the fun part. It was Becky, Hailey, Nathan and I and it was a free for all type game. No teams, every man for themselves. Sad to say… but I didn’t win. Even with all my laser tag mad skills and experience. Hailey won. Yes, the youngest beat us all. She had this new strategy I’ve never seen before. She would shoot someone, and then when they turned around to run away, she would run after them. Like, 2 feet away the entire time, just CONSTANTLY blasting them. When they would try to reactivate, she would shoot them and deactivate them before they had a chance to shoot at her. So that’s how she won that game. Then the next game we played, we played in 3 teams. Hailey was a great asset to our team, because she would always incapacitate one of the other team members by her constant following and shooting. They even commented after the game that she was really fast and could never ditch her. So granted, even though it was a cheap technique, it was VERY effective. And then, since we liked laser tagging so much, we played a third game against some not-so-hardcore people and had a really fun time. The whole day was GREAT!
Check out some more pictures in the slideshow below or go to our pictures page.
Fourth of July on Y Mountain
Jul 4th
We are blogging live from Y Mountain from the iPhone. It just got pretty cold and windy. It’s July! It should be warm! For reals! It’s almost 10 PM and the fireworks STILL haven’t started yet. It actually started drizzling just a tiny bit and we saw some lightning. Stadium of Fire had better start soon. (10:10) yay! Fireworks! (10:25) Its been about 10 minutes since the fireworks stopped. It still looks like things are going on, AND they JUST started up again! Yay!
Provo Canyon Bike Ride
Jul 1st
Yesterday, we went on a bike ride. We got ourselves a bike rack for our car and headed down Provo Canyon. We parked at Nunn’s Park and unloaded the bikes there. We then started biking north past Bridal Veil.
Becky at Bridal Veil
We then kept riding until we hit Vivian Park. Well, it turns out, you can’t bike a trail more north than Vivian Park… Well, I wanted to bike some more so we turned around and headed back. When we hit Nunn’s Park again, we kept going. We kept going and going. I wanted to go to Canyon Glen Park. Then when we got there, I wanted to go to the mouth of the canyon. Then when we got there, I wanted to go to Riverwoods. I was content with stopping at Riverwoods and getting an Italian Ice before we made our way back to the car. Then we biked back through the canyon. (which was more uphill going into the canyon than into Provo… which is probably why the water flows toward Provo instead of toward the reservoir, just an observation…) When we got back to the car, we had ridden about 13 miles. Pretty good for just under 2 hours and our first time out. We decided we’re going to bike more, so you’ll see some more biking blogs in the future.
Here is a map of our bike ride
