Geocaching

I've been cooped up at work or the hotel all week, and I am getting a little stir crazy. I decided to get out and go geocaching, so I looked up a nearby cache and went to find it during lunch.

Geocaching is high tech hide-and-seek, played with GPS units. You play by searching for caches posted on the Geocaching website. You can also hide a cache and post coordinates. Caches may be well camoflauged, but never buried in such a way that digging is required. Some caches are easy to get to ("drive by caches") and some require extended hiking through difficult terrain.

The caches themselves are typically ammo containers or large tupperware boxes, with a notebook, pen, and assorted tchotchkes inside (think: last year's Happy Meal toys). Microcaches have become popular - these are film canister or candy box (altoids boxes work well) sized, or even smaller. These can be very hard to find as the hiding possibilities are immense. Some caches are two or more stages ("multicaches") where finding one cache yields coordinates for the next step. There are also travel bugs, which are tagged items with the goal of traveling somewhere.

Your first cache may require a leap of faith - I remember walking in a park with my GPS unit, searching around a tree, and feeling like this was some elaborate hoax.

This would have been find #80 for me, but alas it was not to be. I wasn't able to spend much time searching so after about a 10 minute attempt, I left.

Approaching the Cache


Under Observation

While I was looking for the cache I noticed I was being watched...

GPS