Kids and caching

My kids are frequently with me when I am out hunting for caches. I have two boys and two girls, ages 6 - 13 years old. Do they always want to go caching with me? No, for different reasons each time. But the saving grace has been our two- way radios, or walkie talkies. If half of us wants the playground (or water, or a different fork of the trail, etc.) and the other half wants to cache (and oftentimes the traffic is too loud or the terrain is too hilly for shouting to be heard), we use our walkie talkies. We can usually maintain visual contact, but audio is often tough because we live in town, with busy highways wrapping around our boundaries. The talkies have been awesome for us.

We use them in non-geocaching life, too. If we are at the ball park and need to split up for different ball fields because game times overlap, we use the walkie talkies until we can meet up again as a whole group. We use the talkies when we're at my family's home place and the kids want to be in the gully unsupervised. I can see us using the talkies at the lake, too -- one in the boat with the fishing group and one in the cabin with the babies.

With a 15 mile range and easy operation, I sound like a commercial. But not until I say the price....Our model costs less than $40 and has a one year warranty (which we have used already). So if we lose one, I won't have to spend a lot to replace it. Now I sound like a commercial.

Happy caching!