Geocaching!

[cjsmith]

Public Service Announcement:

If you haven't been geocaching before, and you get a chance to go with cyan_blue, take it. Thank you, end of announcement. Journal entry follows.

I went geocaching yesterday! cyan_blue had prepared beforehand by selecting a list of caches we could do together. She chose a variety of cache types, ranging in size from a film canister to a Nalgene bottle and ranging in difficulty from "we found it instantly" to "we almost gave up". All of the caches she chose were within a very short distance from parking, although there are many that are tougher to reach, too, for the able-bodied hiker types. One cache she included was an easy flavor of a puzzle cache, and one cache contained a travel bug. I'm sure this level of thoughtfulness ahead of time contributed greatly to my enjoyment of the day.

All told, we found eight caches, consumed lots of drinks, dropped off a digital fish, took custody of a travel bug, and ate at Sneha twice. One wonderful side benefit was seeing interesting little bits of Sunnyvale I had never seen before. (There's an arboretum and rose garden WHERE? And a sports complex in the middle of WHAT?)

Geocaching also turned out to be a good way for me to get outdoors a little without overdoing it. The walking can be short and is punctuated by breaks: sit down with the cache contents and sign the log, enter GPS coordinates, drive.

I had a bunch of little trinkets collected together to make a cache of my own. cyan_blue gave me some important things I needed: a) a little information sheet to staple to the cache log, to explain it to the uninitiated who may find it accidentally; b) a pencil to add; c) good advice on where it should or should not be hidden. Unfortunately, I didn't check out my location idea ahead of time, so when we got there we quickly realized there was not enough cover at all. I will think of another place. If I think of one quickly enough, it would be nifty to put the travel bug in that cache.

I could get hooked on this *really* quickly. :) I could imagine getting even more hooked if I ever get to hike again. :) :)

Comments

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Hi Tim!

I think I'm almost the exact target audience: I like seeing the interesting spot, I like looking for things, and I like solving little puzzles. I even like little trinkets.

The tool to find caches close to a route sounds very nifty. When I got home last night, Rob had me display all the caches close to his favorite airports. Now I wonder if pilots tend to be folks who would enjoy geocaching.

[apparentparadox]

Well, pilots are a bit more familiar with GPS units than the general public.

I'm pretty sure that Mark has thrown his bike in the Tiger & flown off to someplace to find a cache. I'm not sure the bike idea would work for you, though! (Have you thought about a hand-powered bike?)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I can just imagine Mark doing that, too. :-)

I keep thinking I'm going to get better someday -- maybe I should clue in, huh?