Seminole Park Geo-Event & 'Nature Calls'

We had a great time visiting with friends and fellow geocachers at a geocacher's event held at Lake Seminole Park. After I dropped Luann off at home (she was not feeling well and wanted to get some sleep), Katrina I went on a geocaching/nature hunt for ourselves. Time to let the pictures tell the story.

Here we are at Lake Seminole Park, chatting with some of our geocaching friends. It's interesting talking to people and addressing them as; Dark Warlock and Jodster (seen here), but that's the neat thing about geocaching, you can be as anonymous as you would like to be. We actually know their real names, but sometimes, you wonder why they chose their geocacher's names...

The big green box in the grocery bags is a door prize we donated for the event. It's an 81mm rocket/ammo box we bought at the Machine Gun shooting festival. We're glad that Jodster and her husband, Montu Rider won it, because they have a bunch of geocaches in Starkey Park, to include one that uses one of these monster boxes.

Hey, look who it is! Dennis from work stopped by to join in the geocache hunting fun. We had some fun looking for a couple of caches before he had to go to a prior engagement.

Ok, open your bibles to...

I swear, it looks like Luann is giving a benediction service, with everybody crowded around her like that. Actually, she is signing the log of a very tough-to-locate geocache that she found, and everybody else is waiting their turn to 'leave their mark'.

We decided to team up with RainbowGirlz and her son Dark Warlock to hunt for some of the caches in the park. I got this picture of her losing her balance while she was trying to take one of her well-known pictures of her boot at the cache. The cache container is this little white & black dealy that is just above Rainbowgirlz's foot. It was tucked in behind the sign.

We said our goodbyes to Dennis, and continued on to this very hard-to-find nano-sized ceocache in the woods. It took us about 30 minutes, but we found that sucker! While we were hunting for it, we were joined by the group from the previous cache. We counted 9 people at this one spot (don't forget the photographer...).

After the last find, we kinda broke off to look for some other caches away from the rest of the group. This one was really nice and jam-packed with goodies. Dark Warlord kept playing with a stickey, gooey rubber eyeball he found in the container.

Ah, last container of the day. We actually found 6 caches in the park, ranging in size from a nano (tiny!), to regular (ammo boxes).

Time to head back to the pavilion and get something to eat. Of the several hundred people there, you can see many of them were out hunting the geocaches. They will be coming and going all day long...

Hello Captain Biggins, and hello to your Travelocity Gnome too! You can see our Dragon logo on the back of Luann's shirt.

This is the point where Luann was taking a nap at home and so Katrina and I went "oot & aboot" to find some caches. We found this geocache with a trading coin in it (called a Travel Bug) and swapped it with one we were carrying.

We had some success at finding caches, but the best part was when we came across these manatees. We sat and watched them for a long time, and that is pretty much how we decided to spend the rest of the remaining daylight.

It was kind of hard to get these pictures from above the water with all of the reflections. We saw at least 7 of these guys, ranging from a baby smaller than this little guy, to one that was huge!

This is the Hillsborough River, a brackish water canal that leads to the ocean. These guys must have figured our that the water weed and algea tastes better here than out in the salt water ocean. I'm guessing this is true from the way they were eating everything that was green in the water.

It was a beautiful setting and you can see a couple of the manatees on the surface of the water.

As we were watching the manatees, this fish hawk (osprey) swooped down and skimmed the surface, trying to catch a fish. He missed the fish and stopped in the trees across the canal, waiting for another opportunity to cruise along the water's surface... Unfortunately, he didn't alight from his roost the rest of the time we were there, so we couldn't get a better picture of him. As the sun was dropping to the horizon, we decided to head back home. We never did find the geocache located near this manatee lookout spot...