Geocaching

So I’m going to take you backwards in Time. Ooooo. So last Saturday, after I woke up I joined the other newbies for a bit of geocaching. This was the first time for all of us, so in case you don’t know what geocaching is either I’ll try and explain. It’s kind of a treasure hunt of sorts. You go to the website and get coordinates to a location. They do this all over the world btw. So you put these coordinate into a gps and you try to find this exact spot. Our gps wasn’t like the kind in your car it only points in the direction of the site like a compass would. Figuring out how to drive there is up to you. This was also my first time meeting several of my leaders for Toolkit.

Stefan, (Dutch) Paul, (English) and Kenny (English) and his wife Madu, took us and their families on this crazy drive through the English countryside. It was really beautiful and reminded me of parts of KY with the rolling hills. We got to our location after several wrong turns. LOL We were at a very old church. Like from the 1060’s or something. The funny part is that we rolled up to this place in ours jeans and tshirts and there was a wedding going on. HA.

So for this geocache you figure out the word clues and it helps you find the next coordinates. We ended up in the middle of this field behind the church. We looked forEVER and couldn’t find the cache. Bummer. I was really jetlagged but happy to be out, and at one point I heard an ice cream truck off in the distance. Weird. Very random too. Apparently there are ice cream trucks in England with the same music.

After we hunted around we talked with the caretaker of the church for awhile. Then after we realized we weren’t gonna find the thing we eventually headed back.

Sunday morning John (Dutch) took us to his church. It was pretty incredible. It’s a reformed charismatic church formed out of the house church movement in England. OK you nerdy seminary kids have fun with that. For the rest I’ll explain….it was a contemporary church service, informal, with about 70% of the population under 35. And it met…in…a…TENT.

The church is called Oasis and it meets on the site of one of England’s famous cricket pitches, Edgbaston. Although recently the church had to move to the parking lot (a.k.a “car park”). They meet under an ENORMOUS white tent. Like it has air conditioning and huge bathrooms. I really enjoyed the service, it reminded me of Sojourn Community Church in Louisville.

Afterwards we were treated to our first traditional English meal. Which so you know is meat, potatoes, and 2 veggies. And lots of gravy. Yum.

Sunday evening is when all the craziness began with the older teams arriving…
Then Monday morning bright and early….Toolkit began.