We went Geocaching with Lucas, Jessie and their kids on Saturday. We did an elaborate multipart geo cache in City Park in downtown Denver. The geocache had a fantasy, chose your own adventure story behind it. We printed out the story and spellbook and set out on our adventure. You can see all the pictures here.
The first stop was near duck pond at a wooden playground that you could easily imagine was a castle. The king of the castle described our quest: We needed to find the magic walnut that was stolen by Ellamux. We chose to attack Ellamux directly. The search for Ellamux took us first to a grove of cedar trees.
We tried to cast a spell to directly locate Ellamux but we failed. Instead, we tried to follow the bark shavings we hopped she had taken. This spell worked and we were led to a statue that turned out to be Ellamux herself.
We battled Ellamux and were defeated and were carried off by her flying gargoyles. We dreamt that we were walking to another location, but where really unconscious! When we arrived at the next location, we were dropped by the gargoyles who had been hit with magic bolts fired by a friendly magician. We were told to look for an “unusually attractive” dragon marker on the back underside of the cannon. Despite searching the cannon for several minutes we weren’t able to locate the marker.
Fortunately there were backups and failsafes for all the steps: The cannon shot out a magic spell for converting dangerous object to harmless ones and the coordinates of the next location so we were able to continue. The next location was the “All-Knowing, Almost-Never-Eroding” divining stones.
We decided that the stones were pointing east north east and headed in the direction they were pointing. The next location was the royal celebration garden. The roses pointed to the next location:
This is a druid grove that is sometimes guarded by trolls (hobos). Here we had to search the trees for the next clue. We found the cache hidden here and the cache contained the coordinates of the next location. This was one of the better stops on our journey as the cache here was particularly well done.
The next location was the druid gathering place. It turned out the druids knew a way to get into Ellamux’s dungeon where the walnut is hidden. Here we had the choice of searching for a clue in an old waterfall or searching for Freckles. We searched the waterfall with our flashlight for ten minutes without success. There was some construction being done on the waterfall, so we weren’t able to get to some of the rocks.
When we couldn’t find the clue, we used the backup and found Freckles:
Freckles led us to the Ellamux’s dungeon where we had a long battle with the dragons guarding the magic walnut:
Once the dragons were defeated, they dropped the walnut and it fell into a stream running out of the dungeon. We deciphered the coordinates of the place where the stream exited the dungeon and hurried to catch the walnut.
We arrived at the coordinates the walnut was no longer floating in the water and we had to search to find where it had become lodged. This was another well placed cache. Once we found it, we discovered that it was locked with a spin lock. Fortunately our spell book had a spell for unlocking: Tee-Tor-Tive. We had to say it out loud before it worked.
It was a nice cache with a real walnut and a log to sign that was an actual scroll.
Overall it was a really fun cache. We walked all over the park following the clues and ended up walking 2.75 miles. Here is our path:
