Our first weekend Geocaching
I’ve been lusting for a G.P.S. for some time, but Mrs. PA has been a hard sell. Finally, when I managed to drag her into the store to look at one, I casually mentioned the hobby of Geocaching. For some reason this seemed to sell her on the idea. That day we ordered a basic model, a Garmin nuvi 200.
This weekend we struck out to do some hunting. We used Geocaching.com to find the coordinates of some caches near our house. The first day (Saturday), we had selected 3 locations in wooded areas near our house. In retrospect, this was not the best place to start. We only managed to find the first part of a 2-part cache, and couldn’t find the other two at all. It was a bit disappointing, but the walk in the woods was nice. After resting up on Sunday, we decided to give it another go on Memorial day. This time, we chose 4 caches spread around the university campus. This experience was much better, and we managed to find all 4 of them (including one about the size of the end of your little finger).
We had a lot of fun, but it’s clear that we’ve also got a lot left to learn. The G.P.S. isn’t as accurate as it could be. It’s not that far off, but when you are standing in the woods even a 3ft radius can hold a remarkable number of hiding spots. It definitely helped to do some in a more developed setting - we got a feel for what types of hiding spots things are placed in and the container sizes/appearances.
The whole experience was a lot of fun. There are still something like 200 caches within about 10 miles of our house, so I’m sure we’ve got a lot of interesting afternoons ahead of us.
Tags: geocaching
