The weather reports promised warm and sunny weather for this afternoon and I had built up a serious nature deficit, so I took the whole family for a long walk in the nature reserve at Järvafältet.

To make the whole outing fun for the kids, who like the idea of going for forest walks with me in principle but then usually tire very quickly and start whining about tired legs, we tried out geocaching for the first time.

It worked out great – even better than I had hoped. The tired legs didn’t make an appearance until after several hours, by which time I’m sure it was real tiredness rather than just boredom.

I wished for (and got) a hand held GPS unit for Christmas for this very reason, for exactly this kind of outing. This morning I loaded it up with a bunch of easy caches within a few kilometres of the parking lot near Ingrid’s riding school at the south-western edge of the nature reserve.

We had lunch next to Säby lake with hundreds of water birds making noise on the lake. Then we looked for and found two caches which took us to some really scenic spots in the forest. Finally we aimed for a third cache at a picnic area where we grilled sausages.

Ingrid loved the whole geocaching thing. She likes having a goal and a purpose, challenges, scoring points, finding things. She was very excited that it was she who spotted two of the caches, and already wants to go out for more tomorrow.