That's right - that is exactly what geocaching is - a worldwide treasure hunt!
It is so much fun! I mentioned before that my husband got me into it - he discovered it on the web a few years ago.
It began in 2000, when the president of the United States ordered the discontinuation of the degradation of the Global Positioning System signals from satellites, which meant that civilian users of GPS are now able to pinpoint locations up to 10 times more accurately than before.
What this means is - my GPS can find cool stuff hidden in the woods! Wooohooo!
Really - people take say, an ammo box, fill it up with small, usually inexpensive, non-edible goodies, and a logbook and pencil - and hide it in the woods. They then mark the GPS coordinates, go home, log into Geocaching.com and log it there as a new cache.
Then I, or anyone with a GPS unit, can go out and find it! See - a treasure hunt!
When I get to the cache, should I find it, if I want to take out a goodie, I need to replace it with a new goodie.
The goodies might be keychains, small toys, cool Geocaching coins, and all sorts of odd little trinkets.
Often when a person first hides a cache, they will make the 'original' goodies kind of special. That might be a gift certificate to a nice restaurant or even a $50 bill! They don't always do that, but, sometimes...
Also, when you find it - you sign the logbook that is in the cache, and when you come home, you log your find on the Geocaching.com website. That is the number you see in my Geocaching button - I have found 13 of them. I have searched for a lot more - some of them are very hard to find!
And sometimes the caches are tiny, so you don't trade goodies, you just sign the logbook that is in it.
Ok, I could go on and on - there are many variations and cool things like travel bugs, but, I'll leave that for another post.
At least now you have an idea of the game!
No comments:
Post a Comment