Easter After Action Report

My wife is committed to our children. There is nothing she will not do for them. This has been true since the day she became a mother.

For her, Easter is an important day. She instilled that in our kids. But one of the other parts of Easter is the Easter Bunny coming to visit and leave eggs, candy, and gifts.

Yeah, my kids have received new bikes for Easter.

My church is not her church. So when they went to Easter Service, I was tasked with “The Easter Egg Hunt”. I’ve been doing the egg hunt for the kids for the last 15 years now. When they were young, the eggs were placed in the open. It was more of a task of collecting than of hunting.

As they got older, the eggs were “hidden”.

One Easter, there was still snow on the ground. My kids were positive the Easter Bunny was real because there were no footprints. They were unable to retrieve some of those eggs without leaving footprints. They still do not know how I accomplished that.

Then the hunt changed. Instead of just finding eggs, there was an actual task. They had to follow the eggs.

Last year’s hunt was a 2-mile trek through the woods to find 275 eggs. They only recovered 263. The rules were simple. If you are standing at an egg, you can see the next egg from that location.

Earlier, there was only one path. By last year, there were sometimes paths that were dead ends. When that happened, they needed to backtrack to pick up the correct path.

The kids are all adults this year. The hunt changed again.

For the last 4 years, it has been our kids and an extra. This year, it was our kids, the extra, and another half dozen friends. The kids and extra were required to bring a friend or the hunt would have been canceled.

The early arrivals were told, “You have your phones, look up “Land Nav.” You have 30 minutes to learn.

The hunt began at 1400. The first part was exactly as it had been in years gone by. They just followed the eggs.

After a bit of milling about, they reached the first cache.

There was a note with the cache. “AA-025-___”. The eggs were arranged in an arrow. There was an obvious path leading in the other direction.

Having been gifted with commo, compass, and range finder, they started trying to figure things out. They finally figured out that it was a range of 025 yards. They were told to follow the arrow. They didn’t go the full distance, getting distracted by a false trail. I got them to move a bit further and they found the second cache.

This was just a pile with a note: “AB-___-175”. It took them a bit before they figured out it was a bearing.

They finally got moving in the correct direction and at the first obstacle, a shed, they stopped. Finally, one of them looked around back, spotted the cache, which was designed to be found, and they learned the second lesson.

In that cache, they found a note: “AC-076-260”. They figured out what it meant, but didn’t know how to do the actual navigation. The one kid who was doing the right thing got instructions on how to do the land navigation.

From there they were on their own.

I was able to listen in as they communicated on the radio.

Two hours later, they arrived back at the house. The path as laid out was 1.5 miles. They likely did between 2 and 3 miles as they did do searches.

I learned that you have to lay out the caches differently when they can use a swarm method to find things. They reported that they had sometimes found caches out of sequence, marked that cache, and came back to it in sequence.

They found some eggs from previous years.

It was such a massive rush to listen to them on the radio as they found a cache and reported the sequence number. It told me about where they were.

They had a blast. Hagar and I had a blast setting the path.

Total caches, BD. That doesn’t include the false paths.

One of the cool stories they told was when they were on the final leg, a neighbor told them that there was a cache up the road a bit. They thought I had planted that neighbor to provide false information. I’m grinning now. I might have to do that next year.

One of the best parts of today, was that I spotted a “grandfather” playing with his grandchild while I was planting a cache.

After we finished the cache, Hagar and I went to the stone wall. I had Hagar lay out a 6 egg scatter hunt for the little while I went and introduced myself to the neighbor. They are a new move in. And this is New England. We’ve been here for 15 years+ and are still the newcomers.

Well, the grandfather listened as I explained what we had done. Then he got the parents’ permission. We all crossed the road and then grandfather and grandkid started the hunt.

The smile on the kid’s face as they found each golden egg and brought it back to their grandfather was worth it.

All of our kids are going to try to make it back here next year for another hunt. We will be using some different techniques next year as well as different eggs.

We will still put some easy to spot plastic eggs out there. But instead of a pile of blue, yellow, orange, purple with one gold egg, there will likely be one visible egg but not huge caches of visible eggs.