I've been telling Zac to write a post about geocaching...actually, about anything, I'm doing all the writing...But he doesn't. Not yet, at least. He's busy. Unlike me, apparently.
So Zac's Uncle Dan, Aunt Rochelle, cousin Robyn and her hubby Paul came to visit us from Oregon last week. Uncle Dan is big-time into geocaching. It's like treasure hunting using GPS coordinates. There's a whole subculture of geocachers online, it's pretty cool! Someone hides an ammo box, or tupperware container, or ziplock bag, or something water/weather-proof out somewhere, marks the coordinates using GPS, then logs it online. Other geocachers get these coordinates and, using their own fun little GPS gadgets, set out to look for them. There's little knick-knacks inside the cache, and when you find one you take something out and put your own knick-knack in. So you basically have a map to this "treasure," but it's only accurate within about 15 to 30 feet, so there's a bit of searching you do after you get to the right spot.
Zac's been wanting to do this for a while, especially since talking to Uncle Dan about it last summer -- Dan's found an amazing number of caches, more than 600! But after the family left this past Sunday (Unc. Dan even found a few out here), Zac actually did it. The next evening, armed with his trusty Garmin GPS, and one dinky little flashlight, the two of us set out to find "Redhead's Secret Stash," a mere 2.1 miles from our home, and with a fitting name for Zac's first find. It's difficulty is rated 2 out of 5. Not too daunting.
After about an hour of traipsing back and forth behind, beside, and in front of some houses on a friendly little cul-de-sac, we headed home. We hated to fail on our first try, but after some guy came out 3 times in a row to "put out more garbage" while we pretended to look at the stars (which you can see ever so well in the DC metro area), we figured it was about time. The coordinates had the spot planted either in the middle of someone's living room, or pretty darn close. Nighttime just didn't seem like the best time to be poking around someone's yard with a flashlight wearing dark blue fleece. So we went home and looked up the cache again. Turns out we entered one number of the coordinate wrong. That'll do it!
The next day we tried another one, and Zachariah found it after about 20 minutes of searching in a wooded area. It was a lot of fun! We took a travel bug out of it (little items that have a dogtag and serial number, they get taken from place to place and you log them online whenever you move one...you can see where they've been, it's kinda cool!), we plan to plant it in Georgia or Armenia or somewhere around there. This'll be a fun new hobby, it's already kinda addicting. Here's the website about geocaching: www.geocaching.com
No comments:
Post a Comment