When you find a cache, you sign your name and date on the log (paper or booklet) inside, and if there are items inside, you can trade for them. We often find things like toys, small games, coins (foreign or specialty), carabiners, magnets, and other knick-knacky stuff. We recently traded for a dollar bill folded origami-style to look like an elephant! Creative stuff. Some items are "trackable" online - they're called "travel bugs" (or "geo-coins" if they're coins) - which means they have a special number issued and attached to them, and each time a person finds and re-hides the item, its progress is tracked online. It's fun to find items that originated on another continent, and it's fun, also, to place trackable items in faraway places. Adam has placed trackable items from here into caches in both Washington state and Washington D.C.!
Some caches are larger, like ammo boxes or large glass mayonnaise jars. These larger caches are called "traditional" caches. Some are smaller, like film container-sized and even smaller. These are called "micro" caches. There's a picture at the bottom of this post of a cache so tiny it's called a "nano" - all that fits inside is a tiny roll of paper. There are also other types of caches, but they're more rare. One is called a "multi" cache, because the coordinates lead to the first in a series of caches that can only be discovered by finding them in order. We also did one recently that required solving a mathematical puzzle to figure out the coordinates to the cache!
(For a more extensive explanation of geocaching from Wikipedia, see here.)
Anyway, once you have a GPS, geocaching is totally free, other than the gas you use driving to your locations. So it's super inexpensive, and so much fun! The benefits are many. We like the thrill of the hunt - working together as a family (or often, a daddy and son) to be sneaky and track down a hidden object! And it's good excercise when you're out walking or hiking around. We also like the fact that we find new parks and cool places that we didn't even know were there before! Finding out where in the country or the world trackable items have come from is another fun aspect! And once in awhile, we've bumped into other geocachers and made some "friends" in the geocaching world.
Here are some pictures of recent geocaching adventures:
Adam and the boys did a lot of caches on Nov. 28th. (It was the day after Thanksgiving, and I decided to venture out on Black Friday. Whew. That was an experience. Don't know if I'll try that again anytime soon. Not being much of a shopper or a "crowds" person, it's not exactly up my alley...the only alluring factor is the good deals! But anyway, I digress.) Here is one they found at the beach!
One in the woods/brush...
...and one in some rocks!
Here are some of the treasures they found and traded for! (It's always a good idea to keep a little bag of "junk" in the vehicle when you're going out geocaching - trading fodder is quite useful sometimes!)
Drake and Adam went out again a few days later. They're holding a couple of trackable geo-coins they found. The object on the floor in the center is an empty turtle shell they found while hiking around that day! Pretty cool! None of us had ever seen one before.
Here are the boys and I after finding a tricky and creative cache on a short geocaching expedition after church. The name of the cache was simply "89" - it turned out to be a large, flat magnet on the side of an electrical box with alpha-numeric stickers reading "AT9". (They totally had us for a long time because the "fake" stickers on the cache magnet looked a lot like the real stickers used by the power company to mark the boxes, and you couldn't even tell the magnet was there!) So this cache consisted of only a magnet, with a paper "log" on the back to sign.
Here's Adam displaying the nano-cache he finally found (on the screen of the GPS)! He and friend Dave had been looking for this particular nano, off and on, for over a year and a half! Very tricky. It's magnetic and completely blends in with its surroundings!
Here's a close-up view. Wow! Now that's tiny. (Adam calls this one his "nano nemesis"!) This was his second nano find. The little white roll on the side is the tiny paper log that fits inside...and it was really a tight fit!.
.
So that's a quick glimpse into the world of geocaching! I encourage anyone with a GPS to give it a try - it's lots of fun!
