Four years ago, I was introduced to Geocaching and have been hooked ever since. I have gotten out of the swing of it and just took L and Wallace to find some while we were out this weekend. Wallace is too little to get it yet but he can help us enjoy the surroundings.
Basically, people hide little boxes, tubes, tins, plastic zip bags, and various other containers with a piece of paper and maybe trinkets in interesting places. They might be remote, they might have a landmark near them, they might be in a string of parking lots of local pizza places… who knows!
The point is to have a little adventure, see a new place, and tap into your logic and stealth. I have found caches hanging in trees, up in a gazebo, under rocks and in bricks, in a hole for a flag pole of an old row boat used for flowers, and hidden in numerous guard rails and fence posts. There are micro caches, ghost caches, and caches you leave items in for other people to find. When a cache is removed by someone who doesn’t know about it, it is dubbed muggled, cause it’s funny like that. But don’t worry! The people who hide them have to get permission from the owners of the property so people don’t get arrested for tresspassing.
Have you been Geocaching? Where at? Are you hearing about it for the first time and think it sounds fun/crazy/intriguing/ridiculous?
Good Families Do... 
I’ve been geocaching for years and count it as one of my favorite activities! It’s really one of those things that is fun for all ages. My fave that I’ve ever found was in Sedona, Arizona. So well hidden (camouflaged as a red rock) it took me damn near an hour to find it, and it was right under my nose!
I knew you would comment 🙂 That is hardcore tenacity! I probably would have given up before finding that one. I have spent half an hour before and have revisited places multiple times. Chicago were a good mix of easy and kinda challenging. Denver ones were so hard and I think I found one or two! There are more around here than I would have expected but nothing like one every 1/10 (the minimum distance allowed) of a mile like in Chicago. I really like cleverly hidden ones or interesting containers. The row boat one was tied to a string and you had to pull it up (like a tampon is what I said at the time!) Another one I found was a rubber ducky in a parking lot lamp post.
How do you get started??
Click the link and make an account. You can download their app or there is an open source one for android called c:geo. They have paid accounts but I haven’t bothered with it.
I have done Geocaching a few times. It was fun and a good way to get to have a hike out in nature–with a purpose. Not sure why I got out of doing it.
I haven’t been on many naturey walking ones. I stopped for a while because I didn’t have a smart phone that worked without wifi. Then my new phone was having issues and I couldn’t download the app! I plan to check wherever I go now.
I haven’t done it myself but I learned about it a year or two ago from a friend with a 10 year old son. It was an activity that they liked to do together. Very cool!
It is worth trying! I haven’t seen you around in a bit. Gonna write a post?
I used to see people springing out of the bushes in Stanley Park and thought it all very suspicious until I figured out what they were doing. It seemed to be a race though. Do you need to know how to read a compass?
Sometimes you try to move quickly in high traffic areas. I prefer super slow stealth though. I spent 30 minutes outside a Walgreens trying to find one while loitering. You either can get a gps gadget or use the app or maps on your phone.
Or! You can look it up on a computer before leaving and write down any hints or clues left by other people. I like using the Terrain map view on my phone because my gps is off and never puts me close enough to it.
I love geocaching, especially the idea that you could find something hidden in a place you walk past every day. I now just use the geocaching app on the phone, but I used to use a geocaching GPS. It was a handheld device with thousands of caches already programmed into it.
Cool! I tried to figure out how to enter coordinates into my phone once and failed.