MISSION CEBU 2012 (5 of 8)

GEOCACHING

One of our multi stage geocaches brought us to the largest shoe shoe in the world.

Many of you know that my family has a hobby we really enjoy.  It's called geocaching.  If you don't know what geocaching is click here.  We had very little free time, but when we did, our team and the Filipino pastors seemed to enjoy my hobby.  We found 3 geocaches that week.

On Saturday, we were on the way to see the people who were impacted by the earthquake on Negros Island.  I took my GPS so I could see where we were while on the sea and while on the islands.  As we traveled from the ferry port to the Jollibee restaurant, I noticed that we passed a cache.  I had loaded all of the caches within 100 miles of Pastor Juval's house.  Bro. Juval said, "We will get it after breakfast because we would pass it on the way back.  The following three pictures were from that cache.  We passed by a young security guard without being stopped.  We later learned that he got a tongue lashing from his commanding officer.  Steve Thompson ran interference with the officer to keep him distracted and to prevent our arrest.  There was a ROTC drill going on a Silliman Universtiy.  We walked behind the bleachers to the cache hiding spot.  In the second photo, Colin is searching for the cache.  The 3rd pictures is a group photo after we found the hidden cache.  This was the first cache for each of them and my first.  This was also the largest group of muggles (non geocachers) I ever had to evade.

On Monday, June 25, we had the afternoon free between sessions of the Pastor's Conference.  We decided to fill the time doing the "Discover CarCar" 6 stage multicache.  This took us on a tour of the city's landmarks.  We took "Flat Ethan" (that's a whole other story) along for many photo ops.  We learned that CarCar is a major manufacturing center for shoes.  We saw a monkey (very cool).  We could not have done this without our Filipino interpreters.  John said we ought to schedule time for geocaching next year as a way of getting us into the community so we can witness while we cache.  I think that is a brilliant idea! We found the cache at a local business.  

On Wednesday, we had most of the day free.  We decided to do a 5 stage multicache called Valladolid, CarCar that took us to the pastureland surrounding a prawn farm.  We had to to all of this one by foot.  We were dependent upon our translators as we had to ask permission to pass through private property several times.  We took one picture of a guy making coconut milk liquor.  I suspect that it is illegal, but he permitted me to take his picture.  We were to first to find the cache at a family cemetery.  The owner of the cache is from The Netherlands.  This one meant a lot to Bro. Juval because it was less than one kilometer from his home!