A Sunday away from the TV, and Football...



Rollins Reservoir

After attending an out of town funeral on Friday and getting home too late on Saturday to really do any kind of day trip, I spent some of Saturday evening researching something fun to do as a family on Sunday. (Don't worry the DVR was all set to save the NFL action for me to watch later)  :)  I was not interested in a long drive since it was Sunday, and I was pretty tired from the past 2 days.   I started looking at http://www.geocacaching.com/ for a cache or 2 that was interesting and figured I'd find a close by town, lake or park for us to explore.  I came across Rollins Reservoir, which is about 45 minutes from the house.  I knew this was probably not going to have the best of beaches, and was more known for boating, but since we had never been there this was the winner!  The picture in the above right was the view we had from the beach.  Before we hit the beach we had a few geocaching stops to make.  The first stop was a cemetery cache called Bill Bean Is Free! (GCMAV5).  In reading the description of the cache, and seeing that the name Bean was the guys last name, I thought we should check this one out.  Bean (or Beanie ) is my wife's nickname given to her by her sister when they were very young.   


Officer Bean's Bench 

  We arrived at GZ and found that the grave site was for a police officer that died when he was only 29!  There was a very nice bench there for Mr. Bean and I had Maureen sit on the bench for a great picture.  Bean sitting on Bean's bench with the cache too!  :)  We took some time to look at the plot and it was hard not be feel sad.   Maureen wrote a short note in the logbook, and we loaded back up in the car and were on our way.  From there we had just one more stop to make before the beach.  There was another cache that required us to solve an easy puzzle that would take us to a fire station.  This cache was in the town of Chicago Park, which is close to the entrance of the reservoir.  It was called, In Honor of the Brave Ones (GC1MDCP).  I thought this was a very cool name and the description said small children could solve the puzzle, so I figured I could do it!  :)  We arrived and there was a fireman outside the station washing one of the trucks, and he was nice enough to take a picture with my girls.  How cool is that?  We told him we were geocaching and had to find a few things (address, and station number).  Audrey found the address and I found the station number and we quickly solved the easy puzzle, and had the coordinates to the cache.  It was only 250 feet from where we were standing.  It was not long until we had the cache in hand and were on our way to the lake.  Was a great day with 2 fun finds and some relaxing time at the beach, and I didn't even bring my laptop to check the scores in the games.    
 

My girls with Fireman Bryan