Ok, so I’m about to out myself as a total dork here, but I have just started a new hobby that I’m totally excited about called Geocaching. I was out for a walk in the park by my house last year and came across a lady who was looking around like she was lost or was searching for something. Being the good sumaritan that I am, I asked if she was looking for something. She told me that she was Geocaching which is basically modern-day treasure hunting, albeit for treasure that’s generally not worth much in monetary terms.
In essence, you need a GPS receiver and then you visit http://www.geocaching.com and enter a city or ZIP/Postal Code in the area where you live or a location to which you may be travelling. The search results will show you “caches” in close proximity to where you are and you can view coordinates and descriptions for each one. When you find one that sounds interesting, you use your GPS to navigate to the given coordinates and then you look around the area until you find the container which may be concealed in brush or behind a tree, etc. In my very limited experience thus far, the caches are typically hidden slightly off the beaten path in a park or other public space where they’re not likely to be happened upon by passersby.
Inside the container, which can be a small plastic container (similar to something you’d put leftovers in) or something larger like a small plastic tote, you will often find a variety of trinkets that people leave when they visit. There’s also usually a small logbook and pen for people to sign with the date they visited, their name and any other notes or feedback they may want to leave. It’s also customary to, if you wish, take an item or several items from the container and leave items of your own to replace the ones you take. There are also items called Travel Bugs which are items that people take from one cache and place at another one shortly after they find it. These items can be tracked so you can see where they’ve travelled all over the world. Pretty neat stuff!
So far, my loot has included a finger puppet, a United Arab Emirates 5 Dirhams note and a plastic dinosaur egg toy. I’ve left a golf ball, a lens cleaning cloth and a letter opener. It’s really not about the stuff that you find, but just finding it that is the most fun.
The cool thing about geocaching is that you can pretty well do it anywhere. I’m looking forward to scoping out some caches to check out when I go to different areas in town or when I travel to someplace for vacation.
Geocaching is not only fun for the adventure of searching for something and finding it after some effort to navigate to and then locate the cache, but it’s also pretty good exercise. The couple of times I’ve been out in search of a cache, I’ve spent easily two or three times the amount of time I’d normally spend just walking the trails in the park. And, it occupies your time and gives you a goal to your time outside.
All in all, I think it’s pretty awesome so far. I’ve found 2 caches in the past three days and am going to try to find a few more of the ones near here in the next few days! Hard to stay inside and work with all that adventure tugging you towards the door!