WHAT IS GEOCACHING?
What is geocaching? I'll tell you a little of what I know about it, but I still don't know much. I am about to learn a lot more!
For Valentine's Day, my wonderful wife Kit gave me a GPS device (which I guess stands for Global Positioning System?) I love treasure hunts, and a lot of folks nowadays are using GPS devices, which can read satellites to give you an exact location re. your latitude and longitude, to hide and find "cached" items.
Today we went to a city park and played with the GPS. I found our co-ordinates near a huge pile of dog poop, and "marked" that location. We walked about a quarter of a mile away, and then used a feature on the device which led us right back to the poo pile! It even told us how many feet we were from it as we got closer. Pretty amazing technology... There is also a software bundle of maps which can be downloaded into the GPS device from our computer. And the maps are highly detailed!
www.geocaching.com is the website which tells where to find the "treasures" people have cached. You go to the site and punch in your zip code... and voila! There will be a list of caches in your area. A typical cache will be something like a metal ammunition box, or maybe a mayo jar, and in that container will be a "treasure"... which may amount to nothing much. It might be a small trinket, maybe a Pez dispenser, maybe some nail clippers, who knows. But it's the hunt itself that makes it fun. The treasures usually aren't buried, but rather are concealed under/between rocks or in bushes or tall grass.
We may spend Sunday looking for caches around La Grande. When we get around to leaving our own caches, what kinds of things will I put in them? Probably some home-burned CDs of odd music, probably some tacky figurines. No excrement, though.
I will very likely be referring back to geocaching as I continue to blog. Anyone out there have good suggestions about things to leave hidden for others to find?
For Valentine's Day, my wonderful wife Kit gave me a GPS device (which I guess stands for Global Positioning System?) I love treasure hunts, and a lot of folks nowadays are using GPS devices, which can read satellites to give you an exact location re. your latitude and longitude, to hide and find "cached" items.
Today we went to a city park and played with the GPS. I found our co-ordinates near a huge pile of dog poop, and "marked" that location. We walked about a quarter of a mile away, and then used a feature on the device which led us right back to the poo pile! It even told us how many feet we were from it as we got closer. Pretty amazing technology... There is also a software bundle of maps which can be downloaded into the GPS device from our computer. And the maps are highly detailed!
www.geocaching.com is the website which tells where to find the "treasures" people have cached. You go to the site and punch in your zip code... and voila! There will be a list of caches in your area. A typical cache will be something like a metal ammunition box, or maybe a mayo jar, and in that container will be a "treasure"... which may amount to nothing much. It might be a small trinket, maybe a Pez dispenser, maybe some nail clippers, who knows. But it's the hunt itself that makes it fun. The treasures usually aren't buried, but rather are concealed under/between rocks or in bushes or tall grass.
We may spend Sunday looking for caches around La Grande. When we get around to leaving our own caches, what kinds of things will I put in them? Probably some home-burned CDs of odd music, probably some tacky figurines. No excrement, though.
I will very likely be referring back to geocaching as I continue to blog. Anyone out there have good suggestions about things to leave hidden for others to find?
1 Comments:
As long as they don't implant a GPS in each of us at birth, I think we're probably o.k.! Heh! I wonder about the U.S. government sometimes, though...
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