Valentine’s Day is typically full of candies, heart shaped boxes, and pink and red decorations. For our CLC leaders though we felt that our day should be filled with hikes to a cemetery, ghost stories, and elaborate treasure hunts. Even though our plans for the day may have seemed very “ non-traditional “ and “out of season”, we were excited to share our eccentric ideas with our members. But before we started with our activities we had to present our member of the week, Evan Brennen-White! He was a little embarrassed when we presented a small slide with flattering comments and fun facts about him, but he was overall very happy and proud. We played a game of blind-folded “CardStack” and then gave a quick lesson about GPS and Geocaching. Our plan was to get the members informed about geocaching, and then we would take them to an actual geocache that was located at a cemetery a couple blocks away from the Salvation Army. Geocaching was a new concept to many of our members; they were very excited about the idea of participating in a treasure hunt to the cemetery. The leaders thought that it would be a great idea to give a little history about the Valley Cemetery. The members learned that the cemetery was very old and that it was even rumored to have been haunted by ghosts. They were intrigued by the story and were even more excited to try and find the geocache. We searched for a good half hour, and were convinced that the geocache was muggled. We looked and we looked, but there was nothing that looked like it would contain our geocache. Finally, one of our members moved the door knob to one of the cemetery gates and found a tiny magnetic container that had held a small strip of paper for us to sign our name on. We were surprised that the geocache would have been so tricky to find. We placed the geocache back in its elaborate spot and walked back to the Salvation Army. We played one last game there and then packed up our supplies and got ready for teen night. The members loved our activities and were happy to know that there would be more geocaching at future events. Maybe there might even be chances to tell more spooky ghost stories about the Manchester area!
