The Green Bag

Dad and Mom have Fridays off all summer, and we wanted to make sure that we didn't just sit around and do nothing, or fill up those Fridays with busyness, so we've declared Family Fridays for the summer. A few Fridays are scheduled for us, like Emily's graduation party, but on our way back from Tom and Tiffany's wedding, we decided to go ahead and plan as many Friday activities as possible. We stopped at the Michigan Welcome Center in Monroe and picked up a whole bunch of flyers, and then added in other items we've wanted to do as well.

Today's activity was a trip to Lansing, where we visited the Michigan Historical Museum. We walked through a couple of centuries of Michigan history in a fairly short time. It would be nice to go back and spend a little more time in a few areas, but at times we were dodging some school tour groups.

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This has to be one of the best designed museums I've ever visited. Everything is laid out in chronological order, and you can easily weave your way through each floor without missing anything.

The museum complex also houses the Michigan Library, and we stopped in to take a quick look there, too. All I can say from this quick visit is that it's a huge library, but a deeper look here really didn't fit our day trip agenda.

Of course, we couldn't take a trip to Lansing without checking out the Geocaching there. We found our way to a small park in East Lansing that had two caches, but both were a big disappointment. The first was listed as a 1/1 (which typically means easy to find, and easy enough terrain that a wheelchair can get within a few feet of the cache.) This one required bushwhacking through heavy brush to reach and was a flimsy plastic container placed in a damp creek bed. The log book wasn't even the traditional pocket-size spiral notebook, but was cut down from a yellow legal pad. The earlier entries were washed out and illegible, and several pages were falling out.

The second cache was not much better. This was a four-year-old cache, and the location might have been okay when it was first placed, but it's totally inappropriate now. The cache is right by an intersection on a busy walking and biking trail, and is placed where flowers are being actively cultivated to provide a butterfly garden. When we started to search for the cache, we found it impossible to move around without crushing the plants all around us, and I called off the search. Geocaching is not supposed to affect the area - except for some cache in, trash out cleanup - and this cache location could only be considered disruptive.

<rant>Both of these caches were actually bad enough that I emailed one of the site administrators for the Michigan area. I was really concerned about damage that could be done at the second location, and this first cache just irked me. I poked around to learn more about the first one, and found out it had been placed by one of those yahoos who has found three caches and placed two. And one of his two caches were archived by the maintainers because it was only 36 feet from the first. (The minimum is 528' - which is 1/10 mile - and that's pushing it.) We have been geocaching for almost two years, and have found over 100 caches, and I still haven't trusted my judgement enough to place a cache of my own. Okay, maybe a couple of my spots were good, since once I started thinking about them, somebody else beat me to placing a cache there. But still, I've found good reasons to disqualify most of the locations I've scouted for cache placement. All while watching newbies jump out there and place caches without any forethought at all. I know a guy who's an outdoorsman and GPS nut who despises geocaching, and that's why. There are simply too many wannabees running around in the woods trampling down the plant life and picking stupid places for caches. Sometimes it almost makes me want to quit and go find a new hobby.</rant>

We did have fun in the park, playing with the kids on the play structure. We had a nice drive home with dinner and shopping (Target and Lowe's) and then a nice drive down some back roads on the way home where we spotted three deer. It was a great way to kick off the summer, and we're looking forward to many more great outings!