Geocaching is a blast!

I've been meaning to start Geocaching but never got around to it. That changed this week-end. I bought a Garmin eTrex from Best Buy and psyched up the kids about what Geocaching was. Their eyes gleamed with the thought of a real life treasure hunt. After fiddling a bit with the GPS unit to make sure I understood how everything worked, and visiting the geocaching site (http://www.geocaching.com/) we were off. We quickly found two caches in our area in under an hour.

It was a lot of fun, and a very contageous sport. We then met up with family later this week-end, shared our geocaching experience, and took them along on some hunts in their areas. We've only started this week-end, and already have found 6, one on Mount Mitchell, 2 in Charlotte/Harrisburg NC, and 3 in High Point NC.

The idea is you use your GPS to find the cache, sign your name in the log inside, take an item, and place back an item you brought. There are trackable items as well and we participated by taking one of those from one cache, storing it in another some ~55 miles away, then logging our transaction on geocaching.com. These things can really travel.

One surprise to us was how big this sport is, and how many people participate. There are caches EVERYWHERE and when you find one hidden away, and look in the log book, it's not uncommon to find anywhere from 20-50 entries of people who were there before you. One of the items we found this week-end (a relatively new cache, just created 2 days prior), already had about 8 entries, 3 of which were on the same day as us! One of the harder ones we tracked down I noticed we were the only ones to find it in the last 6 months.