David's Blog

Geocaching is high tech treasure hunting. Using a GPS (I have a Garmin GPS V), you download coordinates (Lat & Long) of places where someone has hidden these little caches (ammo boxes, Tupperware containers, etc). You use your GPS to get to the location and then find the cache. Caches are hidden everywhere but mainly in parks or public areas where anyone can gain access.

The biggest site on the Internet for this "sport" is geocaching.com where there are, even just within a 50 miles radius of me, thousands of the caches placed. I go with the kids, but on some tougher ones, I go alone. The goal is finding the cache and signing the log book that each have. We get to the closest point we can park, and using the GPS, which points us in the direction of the cache (based on Latitude/Longitude for this cache downloaded off the geocaching.com site, we head off in the direction the GPS points. Sometimes the hike is a few hundred feet from where we can park and sometimes it is a mile or more. After we get back home, we log the find (or not found if we don't actually find the cache) back on the site.

My kids like, when we find caches have items in them, taking turns trading something in the cache for the load of stash we carry in our backpack. Since my kids do the trading they are looking for kid things and we usually replace them with kid things. Not cheap McDonalds Happy Meal toys (though some folks do - less and less now though) but fun things my kids would like to trade for if they came upon these same items in a cache.

I've met some of the folks involved in the area and even gone on some group hunts and it's been a blast. Just this past weekend as we were getting back into the car after finding a cache in a local park, a man with his wife and kids asked if we were caching. They had been looking for one where the coords were off and I gave him the info for another one in the area we had just targeted.

Geocaching has taken me to locations I would likely never have gone to on my own. It gets the kids (and sometimes my wife) and I out and doing some healthy hiking and to very interesting places. We even hit up some caches hidden around Disney World when we were last there. The kids are always asking me if we can go - you can't ask for anything better then that!

So next time, you are strolling through the park and you see someone with a GPS you'll know they are likely out caching. Also, as you walk around the pond in your local park, you might even catch yourself wondering if there's something hidden nearby that no one (other then us geocachers) know about.

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