November 04, 2007

Geocaching

We went geocaching this afternoon at Ardenwood Park. Geocaching is a game played outside with a GPS. People hide caches and post the coordinates on a website; the goal is to find the cache and log it. Caches often contain small prizes or trinkets. We found 5 caches today, using Gary's very old GPS. Except for the first they were all pretty similar; they consisted of a small plastic container, each with a log book (so we could record our name and the date we found it) and some small trinkets (e.g. kiddie tattoos, guitar picks, a whistle, etc). The first one, in addition to the usual log book and trinkets, also had a smalled stuffed unicorn attached to a Travel Bug, which is a tag with a numerical identifier so it can be tracked on the internet. The idea is to take the Travel Bug with you to another cache so it can travel around the country (or world). Since we are new to this we did not take the Travel Bug with us.

The park where we geocached, Ardenwood, is close to our house, and we'd been there before several times. But, I had no idea there was stuff hidden around there, and we also got to see parts of the park that we'd never been to before (and probably wouldn't have were we not looking for caches). It sounds trivial to type in some coordinates into a GPS, go to that location, and find a cache, but it was a bit challenging. First of all, civilian GPS units are only accurate to within 20-30 feet, so you never know exactly where the cache will be. Secondly, the cache is often hidden from plain view (we found one in a bush, a few in trees, and one in a stump) and camouflaged. I must have walked past the first one we found dozens of times in previous visits to the park, but never suspected there was anything hidden. There are still several caches left to find there, but Elliot got tired and Gary and I got hungry, so we are leaving them for another weekend.

Posted by Jen at November 4, 2007 07:09 PM
Comments

Sounds like fun--a high tech scavenger hunt!

Posted by: Mom at November 6, 2007 03:19 PM

Yes, that's exactly what it's like. Except a lot of the time the only prize at the end is the pleasure in having found the cache.

Posted by: Jen at November 6, 2007 10:32 PM