Kaitlynn and Ben

Posted Monday, August 03, 2009 6:17 PM

My future in-laws own a cabin in Hillsville, Virginia, and every few weeks someone in the family would go up there to clean and do yard work. Ben and I, along with three of our friends (Daniel, Jordan, and Antonne), made plans to head up to Hillsville to do just that. About a week before we went, Ben told me that Daniel had been on Geocaching.com and had found that there was a geocache in Hillsville, right near the cabin!

(Note: "Geocaching" is a worldwide treasure hunt that uses GPS systems as the treasure map. You find the geocache, write your Geocaching.com username on the paper in it, and sometimes leave something for the next person to find.)

I got off of work at around 8:30 p.m., met up with Ben at his house, and then headed up to the cabin, where the others were waiting for us. When we got there, we unloaded the car and then talked about possibly going to find the geocache. The guys seemed anxious to go looking for it, and even though it was late and super-dark and I was tired from work, I was excited to go too! We got out our flashlights and headed for the woods.

According to the "directions," we were to follow the creek until we came to a barbed-wire fence, and then follow the fence to a rock face. The "geocache" was to be somewhere at the rock face. When we got there, we all used our flashlights to look around. I didn't have one, so I watched anxiously as Jordon climbed the rocks and the others shone their flashlights in all of the crevices. After a few minutes, Ben shouted that he had found it, and we all rushed over to where he was. He reached in a crevice, pulled out a pirate chest, and opened it. Inside, there were a bunch of coins...and a ring.

They had me so fooled into thinking that we were geocache hunting that my immediate reaction was: "WHO in the WORLD would leave a RING in a geocache??" But all of the sudden, Jordon and Daniel pulled out cameras and pointed them at me. I was confused as to what was going on, so I looked back to Ben, and he was on his knee with the ring in his hand. That was when it registered.