One day last year, Carl – who drives the #14 bus – asked me what I’d done the night before. I told him I’d made artist trading cards for swap boxes. He’d never heard of swap boxes, so I explained. Carl said it sounded like geocaching, a hobby he and his son share. I’d never heard of geocaching, so he explained.
Geocaching is an ongoing outdoor treasure hunting game in which participants use GPS systems to locate hidden caches. There are currently over 800,000 geocaches hidden around the world.
Like swap boxes, geocaches work on the “Take something, leave something” principle. Geocaches are less random than swap boxes though. You stumble across swap boxes, which are in plain sight in the heart of the city, whereas geocaches are hidden and you have to search for them.
You use the Internet (www.geocaching.com) to download coordinates of a nearby geocache to your GPS device. Then you get in your car and follow your GPS’s instructions until you arrive at the geocache’s approximate location. Then you get out of the car and literally search for it.
I got GC a GPS for his birthday. It tells us how to get where we’re going. It’s not perfect – it calls Merivale Road ‘Merry Valley Road,’ for example. And sometimes it tells us to make an impossible or illegal turn.
But it’s pretty good, for the most part, and on Sunday we decided to try our hand at geocaching between Ottawa and Montreal. (There are some caches right here in Ottawa too, but we had to make a quick trip to Montreal to fix GC’s Mom’s computer.)
GC downloaded some geocache locations to the GPS while I gathered up our supplies: a few treasures to trade, a bag of gingersnaps, a bottle of painkillers and a bag of knitting.
Go Offroad.
We’d run out of instructions. We took the GPS and the bag of things to trade, and started walking. My leg is only good for about five minutes, so we had to move quickly. We headed up that path while watching the screen and trying to figure things out. We went into the bush, looked for the geocache, fed the mosquitoes, and came up with Plan B, which was to go get the car and sit in it while we figured out what to do next.
Our first found geocache!
Geocache Contents
Back in the car we chose our treasure, which was a special tracked item called DanaCatDog’s Cache Racer. We have to register it on a website and leave it at another geocache as soon as possible. (It’s on a race.) We left a Wayne Gretzky hockey card in its place. We signed the geocache’s log book. Then we put everything back in the bucket and returned the bucket to its tree.
DanaDogCat'sCacheRacer
Signing the Log Book
We went to a second geocache an hour later, near the Ontario Tourism Information Station. We searched for the cache for half an hour before finding it in a peanut butter jar in a hollow in a tree!
Hidden Cache
Found Cache
We love to geocache. So far we’ve found nearly 200, but even more fun is creating them and hiding them for others to find. So glad you enjoyed the experience.
Wow Zoom! So cool! I read about this a while ago and would love to try it sometime. Plus about our meeting-up: I have a very cool idea to make it original and fun for the both of us, taking into account our various situations currently. So facebook me and let’s set a friggin date!
Muchos amores,
Max
I’ve done geocaching before, it’s fun.
I have to say, though, you’re better off if you have a GPS that’s designed to be used in the field. Ones that are designed for use in a car don’t tend to be as good when you’re out walking, I find.
I also recommend trying multi-waypoint caches. These usually involve going and finding a clue (ie, the dates off a historical plaque) using them to come up with co-ordinates to a new clue and so on until you reach the cache.
God that sounds like fun.
I am such a geek.
When I walk by the swap box at the corner of Holland and Wellington I think of you.
similar to letter-boxing!! lots of fun “treasure hunting”
Ah, geocaching is great. I went along with a friend once, it’s good fun.
I remember a few years back, there was a “suspicious package” that shut down the Hurdman transit station for at least an hour. It was near the transitway and people thought it was a bomb or something. It ended up being a geocache package.
Sounds like fun – except for the mosquitoes part…
Hi.
Welcome to geocaching!
I was actually searching google for something else and this was in the list and the summary got my attention.
I thought I’d pop in and let you know that you don’t have to trade for a Travel Bug or Geocoin. You can take those without leaving anything, but you must help each on its mission (or at least drop it in another cache!).
And, as a previous commenter noted, having a handheld GPSr is a good idea for geocaching. Since you’ve got a car GPS already, I’d recommend a Garmin eTrex Venture HC to get you from car to cache.
Have fun!!!
Jill, I hope we stick with it long enough to start creating caches of our own! Got any tips for us newbies?
Max, I’m intrigued. I’ll be in touch.
David, we’ve got the Garmin Nuvi255. We’re thinking you might be right about supplementing it with a handheld unit, but that’ll have to wait til we get richer. I hadn’t heard of the multi-waypoint caches – I like that idea.
Nat, that’s funny, I always think of Elmaks when I walk past the swap boxes. But I like that you think of me.
Sally, I hadn’t heard of letter-boxing before. I’ll go google it now.
Em, ha! I remember that! But at the time I had no idea what geocaching was, so it was a bit of a head-scratcher for me.
Gayle, I’m lucky in that mosquitoes only eat me if they don’t have anybody else. I think they have the same problem with my veins that nurses and medical technicians do.
My spouse and older son are into geo-caching and I have gone along a few times. It is fun but I don’t have their patience (especially in the face of mosquitoes). The last time we went out was North of Muskoka and Tim had forgotten the GPS he uses for geo-caching (bought off Kiji for $20) so he had to use the car one. I had to laugh – the GPS works best when you are moving, so he had to run by the spots where he thought the cache was and then guess…