No Raining on This Geocaching Parade . . . .

First moments of "hands on" geocaching for my cousin Rita and her husband Jerry.  They came up from the Tri-Cities to learn about geocaching from Bill.  While they learned preliminaries at our house, the sun was shining brightly.

As we headed east, dark ominous clouds were getting ready to greet us.  A cold pounding rain had started by the time we drove through Hope, but nobody let the weather conditions get in the way of Rita and Jerry having a great time on their first geocaching adventure.

During the outing, which ended with the sun's return, they found five caches.

Today it's raining even harder, but we're hoping that by the time we get started geocaching at Farragut, things will dry out and Rita and Jerry will feel totally confident with their new sport. 

While we stood along the side of the highway where Jerry found his first cache, cars were whipping by on one side and a big freight was headed east along the Montana Rail Link tracks. 

While Rita was closely watching her GPS, I was admiring the scenery with my camera.  That's what makes geocaching so much fun, even on rainy, cold days. 

My cousin Rita happily signals her first find, a Loblolly Love cache at Henderson Ranch. 

Actually, the thumbs up was orchestrated for the geocaching/thumbs-up queen Annie Love who works for the compnay in Seattle which manages the geocaching.com website, etc. 

Cold and wet in them there hills southeast of Clark Fork.

Just another pretty view  at Henderson Ranch while caching.  We had rain; the mountains had snow. 

The clue for this cache said something about "thorny."

Bill and Jerry talk over the day's geoacaching experience. 

We later met Willie and Debbie for a nice dinner at Hope's Sweet Lou's, which opened for the season Tuesday.