A Bike Ride, a Mill and a Geocache

 

One of the many quilt murals in the area

After a leisurely morning we decided to check out a trail that our neighbor told us would take us to the Bonneyville Mill, an Elkhart County Park.  It was an easy 1-mile bike ride through woods and a meadow, along the Little Elkhart River. 

This wrong turn took us on this bridge that suddenly ended, right at the edge of the river!

Without the aide of much in the way of trail markers, we arrived at the Bonneyville Mill.

There were a couple of Amish families having a picnic at the park, too.

There was a geocache at this location, as well, so we brought along our GPS to see if we could find it.  This was a 2 Phase Cache.  Phase 1 required us to answer some questions about the mill and its history, and then give our answers to the Miller, who would give us the coordinates and the Phase 2 clue.

It’s no longer a commercial operation (but I won’t tell you since when!), but you can still buy cornmeal and whole wheat flour that is produced right here at the mill.

We successfully found the answers to the clues (Thanks Bryce!), and after a few minutes spent remembering how to operate our GPS, we were off to locate the cache!

Our walk took us across a meadow,

past an Observation Tower,

and finally down the trail that would lead us to the cache, “off the beaten trail”.

Bryce leads the way with the GPS

We do really well at zeroing in on the location, but we’re still not very good at locating the actual cache.  We’re pretty sure we got to the right place (as long as we can trust our GPS), but we never found it!

Tom and Nicolas checking out the view from the top of the Observation Tower

While Tom & Bryce searched for the cache, Nicolas picked wild raspberries (I wouldn’t let him go into the woods – he gets poison ivy too easily!)

We did enjoy our visit to the mill,  saw lots of beautiful scenery along the way, and got a bit of exercise (even though it was really hot!) . . . so it was all worth it!

Back at the campground, we had some lunch and then went over to cool off in the pool for awhile.  It felt really good after our bike ride and hike!

Tonight we’ll have a relaxing evening around the campfire, and then tomorrow it’s time to go home.    Oh well, only a couple of weeks and then we’ll be off on another adventure!