Today I went with geocaching for the first time! For those of you that don’t know, geocaching is like GPS treasure hunting. You take coordinates for a known geocache that someone else has placed and set off to find it. Usually, there’s a small description or hint. Once you reach the GPS coordinates, the goal is to find the geocache, some sort of small container, and sign the log located inside. In some, there might be small goodies that you’re encouraged to exchange. There also might be a special bonus for the person who’s the FTF – the first to find.
gem surprised me with our first hunt near my house. Unfortunately, we didn’t succeed. We’re fairly confident it was missing. We reached the coordinates but only found old duct tape. Our guess is that the geocache had been removed, but maybe we just missed it and the duct tape was unrelated. While we were at the location, we looked at some very cool houses and found a sidewalk near our house that we didn’t know existed. It goes through a tunnel under the street. It was pretty cool.
Laster, at Jessica’s house, we tried again. Again, we failed. Like our first attempt, we found what we think are remnants – velcro attached to a lamppost, but nothing velcro’d to it. From the geocache description, we learned that it was created by a couple for their grandchildren. Cute!
We didn’t want to keep failing, so we tried for another. It wasn’t too far from our last attempt, but this one turned out a lot better. We managed to find the small canister with a log, a dime, and a penny with the shape of an angel cut out of it. We forgot a pen, so we went inside a nearby store to sign the log. Finally, a success!
Excited from our victory, we tried for another. Sadly, we had another failure. We got to the location only to find heavy shrubbery and palm trees. Unlike the other failures, we found no remnants. Was it missing? Were the coordinates a little off? Were we just dumb? I have no idea. Sadly, this one actually seemed the most interesting. It was part of a geocache series called “Around the World in 80 Days,” I think. Inside the geocache were supposedly hints toward another geocache. Maybe we’ll go back sometime to try again.
For our first day, one out of four wasn’t bad I suppose! It’s definitely a fun activity, and I could see taking it up as a hobby. Maybe we’ll try geohashing sometime!