After our FTF, we went to check out If We weren’t all Crazy We’d all go Insane. We looked for a little bit, but this was a micro cache in an urban area… not exactly our strong suit.

Started the night with the Moores at Zap! This is a micro that requires a fair amount of stealth. There were a few people around, so we didn’t spend a lot time there. Unfortunately, we didn’t find it.

Once we completed the Spring into Summer series, we went back out to Vantage Point. Unlike last time, this time we took the serivce road all the way to the top and walked straight to where the dummy cache was. The cache owner had made a comment that if you found the dummy cache, you were within three feet of the real deal. So, of course, we focused our search withing three feet of that point. Didn’t find anything, though we did have to cut our search short due to a potty training child.

We almost called it a night after the cache on five mile hill and just let Haylee play in the park for a while. But the cache was only a few hundred feet away in the woods right next to the park! We let Haylee take a couple trips on the slide then set out to find Vantage Point. It turned out to be a killer few hundred feet! About 50 feet after entering the woodline on an “as the crow flies” path, we were greated with a fairly steep hill. After the killer climb, we came upon a service road. The service road went two directions… higher up the hill, or back down it. Wanting to avoid the possibility of climbing even higher only to find out the cache wasn’t on the hill at all, we went for the down hill route. We walked about 40% of the way around the hill never getting closer than 300 feet. We decided at that point that it had to be on top of the hill. Rather than the “crow flies” approach we took orginally, we took the service road to the top this time, ignoring the climbing numbers on the GPS. Once we got to the top of the hill, we zeroed in on where our coordinates from the previous finds of the night pointed us. After about 30 minutes of searching, we found the decoy. D’oh. Another 15 minutes or so came up with no luck on the real deal. Though in our defence, by the time we got to the top of the hill, it was quite dark out (which is why we almost didn’t attempt it). We’ll have to make that killer hike again in daylight hours.

PS. The coordinates on the map below are the same coordinates from the geocaching.com listing, not the real coordinates we pieced together.

Following the lack of success at the pier, we went on to Paranormal Michigan #2 – Legends of the Hill to have another unsuccessful run. It sure seemed like the squirrels were attacking us with their acorns out there. As un upside, we did get to see a number of deer in the cemitary… a couple fairly close up, even, on our way out.

The next closest cache to us (as the bird flies, not necessarily on the road) after we finished the lookout was Take a long walk off a short pier. We’re typically not very good at micro caches (or multi-caches because they tend to start with micros), but we decided to give this one a shot anyway. After searching everplace would could think of near the coordinates for the first point, we gave up. Always disappointing to throw in the towel, but sometimes you just run out of ideas.

Too Tempting! was supposed to be a quick park and grab, but as of right now we’re still pretty new to the micro-caches. There’s so many ways we’ve heard about that those can be hidden and we’ve pretty much only found the ones in 35mm canisters to date. Because of where we were, Lilly and Halyee stayed in the van while we each took a quick turn looking.

The evening took a turn toward the not quite as nice with Rix’s Run. We found the first stage easily enough and got the coordinates for the second stage. Logic would say that we were in the right area as it seemed like a really good area to hide something, but we came up empty handed. There were some odd mighty odd trees in the area.

After finding the travel bug in the cemetary, we went in to the village of Spring Lake and checked out the Dino cache. Our final stop before dinner was fruitless, but the GPS was way off and we were both too hungry to spend a lot of time looking. There were also about 100 of the items the hint said to look for laying on the ground .

Our childless evening started in Fruitport with the Treasure of the lost pavillion. It was quite muckey down by the coordinates, but we were unable to locate the treasure at either the original coordinates or the updated coordinates found in the logs left by another cacher. A sad start to our evening.