gotshoo?

GTG got me a GPS for Christmas and her first question was “What can you do with it?”

Last fall one of the guys I mountain bike with told me to stop and park over at Rotary Park. He says, “You got to see this. It’s pretty cool.” We get out and walk by some pine trees off of Archer Elevator road. He’s looking into the trees until he finds what he was looking for. He pulls out a camouflaged film canister tied to a tree.

He explains that the canister is a ‘cache’ and is part of a GPS scavenger hunt called Geocaching. The object of Geocaching is using a GPS and set of coordinates you set out to find caches. A cache is nothing more than a film canister, ammo box, or even a Tupperware container. Inside there is a log of who has found it. There can also be trinkets inside like key chains, patches, pictures, cds. When you find the cache, you can take and leave a trinket.

The coordinates and an up to date log are stored on geocaching.com. From the website you can view a log of who has found it, a map of the general area of where it can be located. What is cool is that even in Springfield there are about 300 caches around the area. Below is a screen shot of what can be found near Lake Springfield.

For my first Geocaching expedition GTG, Buddy, and I set out to Washington Park. In the middle of the woods there is a cache not too far from the duck pond. As we were criss-crossing through the foliage I am telling GTG how far we are from the cache, “80 feet, 60 feet, 30 feet”, as I read from the GPS. Then she stops me, “There it is.” In a hollowed out log there was a Tupperware container. I was kind of amazed that we found it so quick.

There is a lot more to just finding a cache. There are caches that require finding other caches and completing a puzzle before finding the big cache. There are trinkets called travel bugs. A travel bug is an object that a geocacher requests to be moved from point A to point B. Check out the site for more info.

So add Geocaching to my hobby list. If anyone would like to come out some time, just let me know.