Sunday, May 06, 2007

ADDICTED!!!

Oh my goodness! We are now so addicted to geo caching.
I have been thinking about starting geo caching or letter boxing with the kids. Treasure hunting/ hiking, sounded like fun.
Today at the Spring Fling they had a booth for geo caching and some veterans who took us out on our first find. It was a blast. The boy loved tracking the treasure on the GPS and kept us on track. We all loved looking through the treasures when we found the cache. As soon as we re-hid the first we had already determined we were ready for our next. Only a quarter mile away, we went looking for it. At first we passed it and then found it. Jackpot. Addiction grew.
We made up our code family name, signed the log books and headed back in to tell the grandparents about our adventure. It was then that the boy and I decided to try one more. Since it was at a State Park there were quite a few in the area. One of the guys at the booth had set one out that day and we decided to give it a try. We spent an hour looking but never did find it. It was in a ravine and we lost signal a few times. Oh well.
Adventure does not stop there. As soon as we got home the kids were bubbling over as they explained to dad about our finds. Dad was interested in learning more so we found one within a mile of our house and headed out to introduce dad to our new hobby. We were a bit off at first and then some VERY EXPERIENCED cachers (they were on find number 48 for the day) came along and invited us to join them. We found the treasure, asked lots of questions and learned some interesting things. There are hundreds of thousands of caches hidden ALL OVER THE WORLD. There may even be one just down the road and you never knew it. Needless to say my family is completely and totally HOOKED.


What you need:
A GPS
A sense of adventure
A couple trinkets to trade (if you so desire) McDonald's toys will do

To find out more about geocaching, check out this site here. To get actual coordinates to caches you must register. Good news is IT'S FREE!

1 comment:

Mike said...

We had a very similar experience about a week ago.

http://trailmix.net/community/blogs/barlow/archive/2007/05/05/the-joy-of-geocaching.aspx


On Saturday, my daughter found her first "trackable item", a Ohio State Buckeye Golfball that wants to go to Pebble Beach