2008-07 Geocaching

Ray has started to do some geocaching again lately. Geocaching is like a hi-tech scavenger hunt, using GPS units to zero in on the locations of the cache. Containers called caches have been placed all over the world for people to hunt down and then log their visits. Coordinates for the geocache are placed online along with hints and information for the search. Canisters that are used for caches can be anything from a small pill bottle to giant pickle jars. Most caches contain a paper for listing your visit at the site, but some also contain trinkets that you can exchange for trinkets you carry, and others contain items called travel bugs that are moved from one cache to another. The travel bugs have serial numbers and are traced online as they move across the US or the world. There are over 600,000 registered caches world wide. Once you return home you can log your visit online.

Although he did his first a couple of years ago, Ray got started again on a trip to San Francisco where he went looking for various caches with one of his workmates. It was a great way to see the city and get some exercise. The San Francisco caches were all in the city, along roads and in parks. A lot are hidden in plain sight, but blend in with everything else around them, so unless you know they are there, you will not see them. This one was attached to a plastic ivy leaf that was mixed in with all the live ivy growing along Lombard St.

After returning home, he went looking for some of the local caches in the parkland directly behind the house. There are at least 5 caches in the park. Some of the caches can have multiple steps where you find a new set of coordinates in the initial location and then have to move to the new location to actually find the cache. Sometimes the second set of coordinates is given on a piece of paper, but sometimes the cache owner has made a puzzle that must be figured out to find the next stage. In one case, a stone was at the location of the initial coordinates that have a series of lines and dots on them. The challenge was to determine what these symbols meant and how to convert them to longitude and latitude for input into the GPS. Some research on the Internet provided the information and the next location. A concrete dragon head tucked deep in the park was the cache location.

Trinkets can be items such as golf tees, happy meal type toys, items with city or town names, foreign coins or currency. Generally the value is minimal and they are small in size to fit in the cache canister. One interesting item Ray found was a stamped aluminum commemorative piece created from the scrapped airframe of the first UPS airplane.

At the tail end of soccer season, Ray, Hailey and LeAnn pursued a couple caches near the soccer fields were the kids were playing. Ray and LeAnn had hoped to do a little geocaching on RAGBRAI, but time and location did not allow.

Geocaching is fun family activity that can be done by all ages, either alone or as a group. You can learn more about it on http://www.geocaching.com/