New to Geocaching

Welcome! We are Susan and Taylor... mother and daughter geocaching team. Well we are very new at this. Today is our third day of geocaching and we are having a blast.

It's Spring Break week here in a lot of Georgia counties and we decided we would head towards north Georgia. The goal was to visit a couple of college campuses since Taylor is a high school junior. So we headed towards Dahlonega, Georgia to visit the North Georgia State College and University campus. Along the way we decided we would start our geocaching experience.

Our very first cache was in Cumming, Georgia. We decided to stop and try to find our first one along our way north. It was successful! It's always nice when you start something new to have success right off. It was a bit of a challenge trying to get the GPS figured out, but we did. After Cumming we decided we should get to our final destination in Dahlonega, so we headed on our way.

We arrived in Dahlonega somewhere around 3 pm on Friday and got checked in to the Long Mountain Lodge. It was a delightful place with the most AMAZING breakfasts each morning. The owners were very nice and I would definitely recommend a stay and we would definitely go back. The most amazing place to eat was at the Long Mountain Lodge for breakfast. The other restaurants we visited were:  The Porter House (the steak was great, the onion rings had weird sauce, the fish and chips were okay. Nothing great but a good eat), The Crimson Moon (wonderful food, great atmosphere; we would definitely eat here again), Pueblo's (the food was great! We would recommend and eat there again).

Day two in Dahlonega was an early morning tour of The North Georgia State College and University and then a full day of geocaching. We had many successes and our first unsuccessful find. We were not the only one to not find that one.. someone even said it must have been muggled. We get very frustrated when we can't find a cache and we are so competitive that we will spend hours looking. I have always said we are competitive to a fault.

Day 3 was geocaching in Helen, Georgia. That is one beautiful place. It was full of motorcyclist and it was a beautiful day. Our first cache was one that Taylor found out about from a friend. We found the cache, but it was soaking wet and we couldn't find it on the geocaching.com. Our second of the day was unsuccessful. We knew we had to be in the right spot and we spent a LOT of time looking and left extremely frustrated. We say that one must have been swept away down the river. After our defeat we decided to do a little shopping and eating. We had German food and it was very good. We got gifts for the family, especially for Kevin ... My Aussie Love. He'll be getting a nice package soon. After our shopping excursion and belly filling we decided to try hunting again. Maybe a full belly and good shopping would help with the good charma. Think again! We headed over to the park for a cache. We checked the possible hiding spots with no success. We were grumpy now! After that we headed to the Black Bear exhibit, stopped for some shopping at the Biker shop, grabbed a quick cache there and headed back to the Lodge. Day 3 was not a good day for our geocaching adventures and we sulked back defeated.

Day 4 finds us checking out of the Lodge. We are heading further north into Georgia. We stopped at the square in Dahlonega for some quick shopping items, but the shops weren't open so we decided to see if we could get a couple of caches to pass the time. We went to two, the first was successful, the second not so much. After spending a good amount of time looking at our second stop we headed back to get our shopping done and began our trek north. We stopped off at a couple of places along our route, Cleveland  for a couple of successes. It was getting later in the afternoon so we decided to head on to The Dillard House where we will be staying for a couple of days. We may go out tomorrow and see if we can locate a couple around the area. If not we will be relaxing and enjoying the scenery.