Geocaching, Trails and Bicentennial Park (Adventure Alley)!

This week of spring break has been a blast so far.  We went to Southlake to have lunch with my husband today, and after looking for a park through a link my husband sent me and not finding it, we improvised and discovered a new feature on my Honda Odyssey nav.  You can search by places, and then parks, and we found a FANTASTIC park just a couple of miles from his office.  If you've been to Kids Kastle or Andy Brown park, Bicentennial Park in Southlake will look similar!  Here are some pics:

Sorry these pics aren't a bit better, but it should give you the idea!  I really love exploring and finding new parks, so this was great.  While we were there, we got a text from a friend asking if we wanted to go geocaching that afternoon, and I was like - what???  No idea what she was talking about.  My husband looked it up while we were having lunch, and discovered it to be a scavenger hunt of sorts that anyone can participate in at any time.  Is this something that everyone already knows about but me?  Why have I never heard of this?  It is such a great activity for the family!  Here is the skinny:  if you go to http://www.geocaching.com/ and open an account (it's all free), search by zipcode and you will find all kinds of locations you can search where people have hidden treasures for you to find.  Choose a geocache location and you will be given coordinates of where to find it.  That didn't prove very helpful for me because I had no idea how to get to the coordinates.  So . . . I searched for a geocache app and found a free one called Geocache Intro.  This app was fantastic.  It knows where you are, offers 3 geocache options which are close to you, you choose the one you want, and then it shows you where the cache is in relation to where you are.  There is a tab called compass, and when you go to that tab, the red arrow shows you the direction of where the geocache is.  It also tells you how far in miles or feet you are from the treasure.  So, you keep going in the direction of the arrow.  We did one by Central Park in Lewisville today, and the geocache was called Timbercreek Trail Bridge.  There was paved sidewalk the whole way to it, so the boys got on their bikes and had a great time tracking it down.  Once you find the hidden treasure which is usually hidden in a small tube of some sort, you take the treasure that was left there, and leave a different one for the next person.  It needs to be the size of a small rock.  The one we found today was an orange crystal looking thing.  We didn't have an item small enough to trade out so we had to leave the orange crystal there.  7 year old was not happy about that at all since he was the one who made the discovery. 

Behind Central Park are so many trails, some paved and some not paved.  The boys just love getting out there on trails so that was fun as well!  Yesterday we went to Andy Brown park, and behind the pond there are some hidden trails that you can get on.  Perfect for the young ones!