The weather has finally gone from muddy to crisp so we went out geocaching again. Eric and I could and do walk for hours without any extra activities, but for Adrian geocaching makes all the difference. A boring walk turns into a game. This time we went to Järvafältet, near Akalla, and picked up eight caches there.

This part of Järvafältet is quite fun to walk around in, because it’s so scruffy and varied, but still easily walkable. There are paths everywhere, but the paths go up hills and over rocks and in between deadfalls and marshes and ditches. You have to be alert and look where you put your feet. It was a good thing the ground was frozen today – one of the caches was in the middle of a marshy area that would have been really muddy otherwise.

Adrian took care of navigation today, with only a minimum of help. He’s been learning map reading both at school (where they’ve done some basic orienteering in gym class) and with his scout group, so now he actually knows what he’s doing.

With a GPS it’s mostly enough to look at the blue track line and make sure the dark blue triangle moves towards the cache rather than away, which doesn’t take much in the way of map reading skills. But he could also use the GPS map to figure out whether we should turn left or right on the next track we hit, so he can clearly relate the map to reality. When I pointed out some contour lines on the map for him, he took a look around and concluded that the cache would be at the top of the hill.

It was good for all of us to get out of the house, but Adrian seemed to need it most. His friend M has been away during most of Christmas break so he’s been sitting around the house more than usual and really needed to move and run around for a while.

Had I been here on my own I would have stopped to take photos of the pretty patterns in the ice, but today was not a photo outing.