By Emily Accipiter Stewart (eaccipi)
April is just around the corner as I belatedly write this for our GeocacheAlaska! Members; I hope you’ll forgive me for the delayed timeline – sometimes life gets really busy and it’s hard to do everything that needs to be done.
It’s also hard to find time to fit the things we love in our lives together when time is limited and the to-do’s are piling up. So, I’ve been trying to work on ways to combine things that need to get done with the things I want to do.
For example, the weather has been so nice and sunny, and I’ve been wanting to spend more time outside. When a co-worker asked me if we could meet to go over some of the details about an event we had coming up, I asked if we could take the meeting on a walk. Since we didn’t need laptops, we just brought our phones and made notes as we talked, doing a 30 minute lap on the trails around our office. We got 2 miles under our feet, fresh air, and finalized the plan for the event. Three birds, one stone!
We’ve now started making daily walks a part of our workflow. But, I feel like I’d been neglecting geocaching, which I wanted to do – especially with the new Treasures released! Looking at my geocaching.com map, I noticed the route we’d been taking had 5 caches along the route, and there were another half-dozen if we made slight modifications. So, on one of our walks this week I asked the group (which has now grown to 4!) if they would mind if we stopped and found one geocache on our walks each day. They were game to see what it is I’m always talking about, and helped me make the find – a multi-cache I had attempted alone previously during a snowy winter and had never gone back for. With their help, I was able to find the cache, introduce my favourite activity to them, and add a smiley to the map.
As I write this, I find myself in Los Angeles for work. I’m not too far from the airport, but I’m seeing a fair amount of caches that I could make a 15 minute or less walk to go get (which is my plan, after I finish this off and get it to our Newsletter Editor!). I’m excited because it’s the perfect way for me to explore when I’m on a work trip and get out of a hotel or conference space.
I know there’s not an easy way to add geocaching to every activity in a busy life – sometimes there is only an opportunity to do the priority task and move on, but if you’ve been in a bit of a busy season, I hope you take the time to take a deep breath and find a chance to do something for yourself. It can be geocaching, taking a walk, finding 10 minutes a night to make progress on a book, or even one DuoLingo lesson a day (hey, those international geocaches don’t always have an english translation!) – Take the time for you!
Let’s cross our fingers for a beautiful Spring that gets us all outside! I know the Events Committee has some great ideas in the works – I hope to see you out there!
See you on the trails,
Emily Accipiter Stewart
President, GeocacheAlaska!
eaccipi