Tuesday, March 19, 2019

What Is Geocaching?


What On Earth Is Geocaching?
Or, Why do I keep seeing you skulking along guardrails?


Geocaching is a game using a gps.  It's jokingly referred to as "What happens when nerds go outside."  :-)  Containers, known as "geocaches" are hidden all around you.  It could be a small magnet, or a full size ammo can - but in this area, it's very likely you have passed one at some point.  Players go to geocaching.com (there's an app for your phone) to see where the geocaches are hidden, then they use the gps coordinates to navigate to the locaiton and find the container.  Inside the container is a log - which is just a piece of paper that you must sign to claim the find.

Some caches are super easy to find.  We've found ammo cans in the woods that we could spot long before we got to them.  Others can be really tricky - such as a fake rock in a pile of rocks.  They can be at really great locations, taking you to a place where there is a great view, or an interesting sight, or piece of history.   Or they can be under the skirt of a lamppost in a parking lot, or in a guardrail.

Which is why you will sometimes see us parked along the road, skulking around a guardrail.
Well, you probably didn't see ME at a guardrail, I hate guardrail caches.  But you may have seen Molly & me in the car while Dan looks for the cache.

Molly Mouse is watching Datruck find a geocache in a guardrail, in the photo above.  Molly hates guardrail caches, because she's usually not allowed out of the car for those - I'm too afraid she would get hit by another car.

Our favorites are puzzles and gadget caches.  Some geocaches require you to solve a puzzle to find the coordinates.  Others take you right to the cache, but you have to solve the puzzle to open the container.   There are a lot of really creative people who hide geocaches, and some of them are really, really fun to find!

There are also usually cache containers near cool and interesting things.  Whenever we plan a trip, one of the first things I do is search the geocaches by favorite points.  That's often how we find a lot of the weird, interesting, and beautiful things we see on our road trips.

Dan treats geocaching more like a competitive sport - he loves to find every cache, meet every challenge, and get together with other cachers to find the hides.  I treat geocaching like a tour guide to find all the off the beaten path places that I wouldn't find on my own.  It works for both of us, and is a fun hobby we can do together.

We started out when the kids were young - and it was a lot of fun to go as a family, on long hikes in the woods to find an ammo box hidden under a pile of sticks or stones.  Now that the kids are grown, and Dan has a workshop in his new shed, we're having a lot of fun not only finding, but building & hiding our own caches.  

On Geocaching.com, we are Datruck's Crew

Profile for Datrucks Crew

Dan runs a facebook group for geocachers in the Susquehanna Valley to discuss caches, hides, locations, events, etc: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SVGeo/

Read More About Our Geocaching Adventures & Tips Here
https://susquehannavalley.blogspot.com/p/geocaching.html



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