The concept is simple - while your out walking the dogs, or taking a stroll down the river or similar why not make it more interesting and seek out some buried treasure! ok so treasure in the loose sense of the word, as far as i know there is no pot of gold located at a geocache site, but its 'treasure' hunting no less. And, to appeal to my geeky nature; its all about GPS and Gadgets!
I was aware of geocaching but only recently did Anna and I look into it properly. Once we had found that there is an official iPhone App and we had viewed the introduction video's on http://www.geocaching.com/ website we were all excited about having a go. After a few minutes familiarising ourselves with it all we had created an account and we realised there was a geocache hidden less than 500m from our house!
There are currently 1,351,307 active geocaches around the world, some are tiny little things with just a small log book to sign your username in, some are larger containers where people leave items that you can swap (these are the ones Alex likes the most!). Part of the fun is seeking out the location, the walk to find it and then when you are near, the hunt is really on to find the well hidden container whilst not alerting non-geocachers to its presence! In just a week we have 'found' 8 Geocaches with more local ones to attempt as well as plans to incorperate geocaching into our camping trips and weekend dog walks.
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| A medium cache - room for swaps, log book and more! |
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| A micro cache - just enough space for the log book and pencil |
Most people use handheld GPS devices it seems, but the £6 iPhone app is proving to be accurate enough for us to use (and cheaper than a £300 GPS unit!). It allows direct access to 'nearest caches', searches by postcode and then you can log your finds direct to geocaching.com from within the app; even including a photo if you want! Genius!
We are officially hooked and are looking for any opportunity to go grab a cache!
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